Archives

BLACK GARDEN

BLACK GARDEN (WORK IN PROGRESS)

 
Armenia is a small country in the heart of the Caucasus. It is also my homeland. Like many Armenians in France, my great-grandparents lived in present-day Turkey and emigrated to France during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. I have been immersed in this culture since childhood. Ten years ago, I traveled to Armenia for the first time, in order to discover this country that I still knew so little about. Since then, I have photographed this territory extensively. In 2016, a few weeks after the “Four-Day War,” I discovered the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which literally means the “black garden.” It is a contested and landlocked region of the South Caucasus, which has witnessed nearly 30 years of armed conflict between Armenia (of which Nagorno-Karabakh was a former province) and Azerbaijan. 
 

I was struck by the ferocity of the destruction there: nothing had been spared, not even the schools. The villages were deserted. Later, I learned that people equipped to lead self-sufficient lives were gradually returning to this no man’s land, even as both fronts dug new trenches. It seemed to me like the right time to undertake a project focused on this forgotten conflict, one of the grey areas of history. On a personal level, the conflict felt powerfully evocative, but remains something that no one has a very good understanding of, with the exception of the two warring parties.
 

Black Garden portrays the strange reality of life in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the marks of war are ever-present. They are visible as much on the weathered faces of the inhabitants as they are in the devastated landscapes. It’s a place that is reminiscent of the violence of war, where this “frozen” conflict has the potential to resurface at any moment. How does daily life express itself in an unresolved time, perpetually on the brink of war? How does such an existence affect culture, traditions, architecture? 
 

This project, which began in 2016, attempts to understand the inhabitants of this region, their struggle for independence and why, despite years of unrest, they remain committed to this cause. For the majority of the population, living here is an act of resistance. Telling this story has become a personal obligation of mine: I feel compelled to give a face to this people, and to do so with compassion. 
 

In a world steeped in patriotism and military culture, where personal misfortunes and misery feed a sense of collective heroism, these inhabitants are doomed to be the tragic characters of an endless war. This project is both evidence of their past and present, as well as an attempt to understand their future. 

Aragats

Pitch: Mount Aragats and the Armenian astrophysicists

“I’m not used to giving tours,” the Armenian astrophysicist Kamo Gigoyan confides in me, trembling slightly. He searches for the key, inserts it into the lock, and opens the door to a retrofuturistic building. Inside, a journey through space and time awaits. The silver-toned structure houses a gigantic 2.6-meter telescope made in the USSR and installed in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1975. In the control room, a few flat screen monitors sit adjacent to a behemoth, a relic from the Cold War.
 

“Even if we no longer use it, this computer still works very well,” Kamo Gigoyan assures me. As a young man, the scientist had aspirations of becoming an astronaut but, after refusing to submit to the orders of the Red Army, he pursued a career in scientific research instead. For the last 37 years, he’s had his head in the stars and his feet firmly anchored to the slopes of Mount Aragats, in northern Armenia. Three others astronomy research centers dot the landscape of this former volcano. Two of them are still in operation and the third was abandoned by the Armenian government. After years of fighting with Moscow to install these astronomical observatories in Armenia, the research centers played a pivotal role in the space race during the Cold War. In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved and Armenia floundered. “The collapse of the USSR put an end to all Soviet scientific research.
 

The first war in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and the energy crisis of the 1990s were additional obstacles to the proper functioning of these astronomy research centers,” explains Arevik Sargsyan, a Doctor of Engineering and the director of the Herouni Mirror Radio Telescope rehabilitation project. Ever since, Armenian scientists have been fighting for “the survival of Armenia” and astrophysics. The engineer hopes to once again place her country at the forefront of the global scientific research community. International visibility could constitute “a means of deterrence against potential attacks from Turkey or Azerbaijan,” according to the scientist, who believes “we must develop and invest in what we already have, especially after this last war; we must rise from the ashes of our heritage, like a phoenix.”
 
Text Morgane Bona

Sacha

Sacha is the second book by the young French photographer Alexis Pazoumian. In this firsthand account of the climate crisis, Alexis Pazoumian guides us on a photographic odyssey across the far reaches of the world’s coldest region, Yakutia. In a country that’s estimated to be warming up three times faster than the rest of the planet, it’s Russia’s icy heart.

 

These images, and the accompanying text, are the result of a project carried out between 2017 and 2018 in Eastern Siberia. The book recounts the author’s journey from Yakutsk, along the infamous Gulag Trail, to his ultimate encounter with Sacha, a reindeer herder who cherishes his freedom, living alone in the middle of the snow forest, known as the taiga.

 

  • TO MY GRANDFATHER

If Russia has always appealed to me, it’s no doubt because of my family history. My grandfather, Richard Jeranian, was a painter, and he was one of the first artists of his generation to go to Moscow in 1957, before exhibiting his work in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1980. Tales of his travels through this country that’s as distant as it is strange filled my childhood, and stirred in me a desire to discover it for myself.

 

In the early 2000s, members of a distant branch of my family emigrated to Siberia to escape the misery that was affecting Armenia at the time. They settled in Yakutsk, like many other minorities, including the Kyrgyz and the Uzbek. Yakutia is a very rich region; the land is full of gold, oil and coal, and it’s also the world’s largest producer of diamonds.

 

The Yakut people say that “when God flew over Yakutia one winter’s day, his hands froze and he dropped all of his treasures.”

 

Learning that I had family there, I naturally decided to go toYakutsk. The climate there is hostile: it’s one of the coldest inhabited places on the planet, where winter temperatures reach minus 60°C. Observing the inhabitants in their daily life, I assessed their energy level, capturing it in images in order to better understand how life is organized in these extreme conditions. “Such a big city in such hostile lands, a few hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, feels like an anomaly.” (Sylvain Tesson)

 

It was only later that I discovered the existence of the indigenous Evens people, a community of reindeer herders. I lived by their side for several months, cut off from everything, in the middle of nowhere, lost in these vast boreal forests known as the taiga.

 

 

Faubourg Treme

There are many similarities between Louisiana and my country of origin, Armenia. That they are a victim of a natural disaster or a crime against humanity, a doggedness of the history(story) bruised these populations, but never overcame, on the contrary even, their fighting spirit …

 

Here, as in my travels, I have witnessed a people faced with a key issue: the reconstruction. Despite the terrible adversity of life, in the rubble or precariousness, a strength leads these people. A survival instinct transcends these women, men, and children. It is this vital force which I wanted to retranscribe in this series, bringing me to these people, where the strength of their expression views each of my portraits.

 

Music played a major role in this reconstruction. During the slave trade, the slaves were already meeting every Sunday on « Congo Square » to dance to the drums of their distant native land. Later, the « Creoles of color » or « free colored People » regularly gave concerts of brass instrument. Unknowingly, they put the bases of what would become one of the most fertile musical genres in the world: the Jazz. Since then, music has never left these places. On the contrary, it is mixed with many local cultures and interfered in all aspects of life: religion, traditions education …

 

Ten years after the disaster of the hurricane Katrina, « Faubourg Treme » focuses on the daily lives of residents of Treme, legendary district of New Orleans, the birthplace of Afro-American culture. I decided to go and meet these people to follow them in their daily lives. For six months, I shared the life of these people. I noticed that the music was the key of this revival as an open door to the escape face the hostility of life.

 

« Faubourg Treme, » this is the story of a neighborhood that survived. It is a tribute to the music, art life-saving and emancipating for these people. Art that has interfered in every aspect of life. Art that allowed people to live and resist. Art whose strength is reflected in the look of each and who united my portraits.