Maryam Ashrafi’s Rising among Ruins, Dancing amid Bullets gathers a sustained photographic engagement with Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan. Developed from work undertaken between 2012 and 2018, the book addresses a region marked by armed conflict, contested borders, displacement and Kurdish experience. Its title sets the governing tension: destruction is present, but it does not wholly define the lives pictured within it.

Ashrafi approaches the subject through social documentary photography and the extended attention that a six-year project permits. Rather than reducing Kurdistan to a single episode of war, the work follows the persistence of people and communities across time. Ruins and bullets name the conditions surrounding them; rising and dancing insist upon agency, movement and the continuation of ordinary life. The resulting perspective holds violence and resilience together without treating either as a simple emblem.

The photobook format gives this body of work a different force from an isolated news image. Its accumulation of photographs allows conflict to be understood not only as an event, but also as an environment with social and human consequences. The volume is further framed by contributions from Allan Kaval, Mylène Sauloy, Carol Mann and Kamran Matin, placing Ashrafi’s photographs in conversation with several voices rather than leaving them to stand as detached evidence.

Published by Hemeria in 2021, Rising among Ruins, Dancing amid Bullets merits attention as a long-form record of a politically fragmented region and of the lives maintained within it. For collectors of documentary photography, books on borders and displacement, or contemporary representations of Kurdish communities, its significance lies in the conjunction of duration, geographic specificity and collaborative context. It preserves a defined period of Ashrafi’s practice in the form best suited to sustained looking: a deliberately assembled photographic book.