Everything the Old Country Has Forgotten and Nothing The New One Has Seen Before is an ongoing series of photographs of the Armenian diaspora today. Despite the formal, seemingly documentary visual language of these images, there are wide-ranging historical and political references, all exploring the day-to-day interactions that bring the Armenian identity into being, link by link, note by note, image by image.

I use the photographic process as a means of cultivating relationships with members of the Armenian community I belong to by blood but have been estranged by circumstance. Though America has a large Armenian diaspora, I myself have not had the opportunity to enjoy a connection with other Armenians. So I use the practice of documentary photography as a means to use the time it takes to set up my large format camera and compose a composition to physically sit with and converse with the sitter. Many of the individuals I have photographed for this series happen to be artists: a classically-trained guitarist, a dance troupe, a potter, and architects. I realize now that the work itself had been organically (and almost autonomously) encouraging me to examine how a community--especially a diasporic community--creates itself.  The images in this series investigate what it means to belong to a community, especially a community that has survived genocide, dispersion, and the personal and political disconnections from modern structures of a nation-statehood.

This body of work is dedicated to the one and a half million possible futures, marched into the desert and planted in the barren landscape, yet irrevocably woven into the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and helping us to imagine our community’s future from one Armenian to another.