Secondhand Witness includes images made with my family’s archive of slides from Beirut at the start of the Lebanese Civil War, as well as photographs of my parents’ current home in Pasadena, California. The series reflects on the conditions through which memory shifts through the different contexts it occupies. It addresses how photography can be used to articulate geographical as well as perceptual distances through different lenses in history.
Say That You Are a Stone is a photographic investigation that traces how cultural identity is pieced together through information that is transferred and translated generationally. The title for the series comes from a passage in Mahmoud Darwish’s “In The Presence of Absence.”
The photographs in this series were part of the exhibition “Edo Oo Bes (No One But Edo)” presented at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock in 2014, a collaboration between myself and octogenarian Armenian portrait photographer Edward Tatoulian. The exhibition included Tatoulian’s historical work alongside my own photographic responses, inspired by Tatoulian’s archive as well as our shared Armenian heritage.
Portrait Studio is a collection of portraits of Armenian photographers from Los Angeles within their studios. The photographers were photographed with their signature lighting and holding their favorite cameras against the backdrop of their choice. This body of work aims to document the studios as sites of preservation and representations of spaces that exist in cultural and social transitions.
Picturing Beirut is a collection of writing and photographs that asks what it means to know a place. Through this book, I explored a prismatic view of Beirut, my parents' birthplace, that entwined memories of the past with the realities of the present.
The photographs in the book were taken during a trip to Beirut in 2013.
In 2018, I was commissioned to photograph Armenians in Pasadena, California for a global research project by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, administered by the Armenian Institute, London. Led by a team of academics and researchers, the Armenian Diaspora Survey was piloted to provide a snapshot of the contemporary Diaspora and its relationship to the homeland.
