Daughters of the Sun

Leporello

Claire Felicie, a photographer based in Amsterdam, visited Iraqi Kurdistan twice: in 2017 and 2018. This handmade leporello gives an impression of these journeys and her encounters with female Peshmerga fighters. She shot the portraits and landscapes on film and printed all postcard-size photos in her own darkroom. The outcome: this leporello, with an additional handwritten letter, is a celebration of hand labor. An ode to analog photography in a digital age.

Dimension: 6.3" x 4.7" x 4.5" | 16 x 12 x11.5 cm
Year: 2019  
Edition: 25

From the review by Sabrina Mandanici in Collector Daily:

Photographs have never been able to capture the invisible, such as beliefs, convictions, or of any sensation residing in the heart, the mind, or in-between – yet, in the hands of the right photographer, they can be evoked through metaphors, both visual and verbal. Felicie has done so, elegantly and sensitively, in her previous projects, such as Only the Sky Remains Untouched, exploring the syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder of Dutch veterans and Here Are the Young Men, investigating the visual effects of war upon the faces of young marines. In Daughters of the Sun, emotional clues about who her subjects might be, or rather, what motivates them to fight, are palpable in the tender close-ups of the women’s hands, affectionately holding objects given by, or reminding them of, their loved ones – such as necklaces and pendants, an old passport, or the photographs of a deceased brother, of a small child, kept on their phones; which, through cracked screens, invoke an uncanny feeling of sad intuition.