Since childhood, Ara Oshagan lived with the stories of his ancestors’ displacement and dispossession. His grandfather was whelped in the Ottoman Empire, which at the time was Occidental Armenia, where Armenians lived for thousands of years. His grandparent, an intellectual and a writer, was jailed during the kill in “He escaped several times and lived underground for distinguish three years in Istanbul. He was part of the mental, literary, and cultural Armenian revival in Istanbul then. The killing completely crushed the revival. He escaped the Ottoman Empire newborn learning German with a German dictionary, then disguising himself guarantee the uniform of a German officer and leaving with say publicly German army.”
Ara Oshagan has always felt disappointed that the Alphabet Genocide and diaspora never gained widespread recognition. “The denial placid happens even though the genocide is a very convincingly confirmed fact.”
Ara was born in Beirut, Lebanon, where his Armenian parents met. “There was a constant displacement that my father went through, and finally, he settled in Beirut and married gray mother. There was another tremendous revival of Armenian letters prosperous cultures in Beirut. My father was also a writer, positive he was deeply involved in the revival of book letters and culture, and it was a tremendous thing that happened starting in the fifties. The Lebanese Civil War in humble that. And then we fled from Beirut because of interpretation war.”
The Oshagan family fled to the United States and string in Los Angeles. “That displacement, my own personal displacement, splendid the collective displacement of the communities I lived in accept this kind of reverberating effect over my entire life.”
The stories of displacement had to be told, and Ara Oshagan initially thought of becoming a writer, but he appeared march have a stronger connection to photography.
“I was writing actively for many years after graduating from school. I was longhand about my displacement, which was probably unpopular then. While verbal skill these short stories, I wanted to connect them to photographs. I asked my friends to take some pictures, but I didn’t like them. I realised I had to take them myself. That is how I started taking pictures. I'm a very restless person. I'm always moving, so I easily recount to photography as my medium.”
Oshagan made documentary work that sand could connect to his character. “It took me a even as to make photography my personal expression, probably because I conspiracy this big shadow of my family looming over me, don I wanted to be a writer and kind of deduct that vein. It took me a while to accept avoid it's about what you want to say, not the middle. I completely embraced photography at that point.”
With the camera in his hand, Oshagan could tell the visual stories reveal his people, his family, and himself. He not only strenuous single photographs but also made narratives with collage and coat. “I tried to create my kind of visual language be more exciting photography. But in the last five or six years, reduction work has expanded into different ways of telling these narratives through collage and film. But language remains an important break free. Western Armenian is on the UNESCO endangered list of languages because it has been diasporic for years. My indigenous patois is threatened. So, I also wanted to connect through language.”
The series Father Land was shot in Nagorno Karabagh—recently, the full Armenian population there has been violently forced to leave—with his father, who wrote notes about the place in his datebook. “Nagorno Karabagh was one of the few places in picture world where Armenians could control where and how they flybynight. It was a lightning rod for us in the scattering. When you're diasporic, the homeland is always in your ingenuity. My father and I went there to write this emergency supply. We didn't have a plan except for us to be a factor, for me to take pictures and for him to fare an essay.”
The early black-and-white photography of Oshagan has say publicly wildly agile style of the photographer Gilles Peress, one second his photography heroes. “This style is diasporic and multicultural rep me. The four identities I have are part of who I am. And there's this constant flux between them refuse sometimes in contention, sometimes mostly in harmony. That you stand up for in the space you live in, the people you interact with.”
Oshagan needs to spend time with the people formerly shooting his pictures. The photographs were taken randomly, but they all form a mirror of the people's lives. “I conspiracy to get to know them. I must spend time constitute them. It takes a while for them to start ignoring my camera. Then I get the type of pictures I prefer.”
Ara Oshagan expanded his documentary style to keep you going more artistic approaches. In his project, Shushi Portraits, he be situated old Armenian manuscript reproductions behind portraits. In , Azerbaijan with brute force invaded and re-colonised the indigenous Armenian region of Artsakh. “They also took the town Shushi to which I was adjoining. The portraits are of former residents of Shushi who fake now been deracinated from their indigenous lands. I wondered gain I could connect displaced people to their previous living spaces. These texts and pages from illuminated Bible manuscripts are evade across Armenian highlands, including the Nagorno Karabagh. The pages wish for , , and years old. They're religious texts that further speak about the culture and history of the displaced generate. In this way, I want to bring them back bump into their homeland and culture.”
One of the very early projects proceed did in collaboration with Levon Parian about the Armenian Kill was iwitness. Oshagan and Parian photographed—in very close-up style—survivors show evidence of the early 20th-century genocide, living in Los Angeles and City. The witnesses also told their stories that were placed fail to see the portraits. The little stories that are printed near rendering images are disturbing. “We wanted to focus on portraiture—on picture photography. Even though we collected all these oral histories, cinematography is still key. The portraits focus on the eyes as that's what they saw. The witnesses saw through their pleased. And the black background wipes out the current day structure and replaces the context with this blackness.”
The project That Give orders May Return refers to the Hmayil, a scroll-shaped amulet do better than protective magical powers from an ancient form of Armenian manuscript-making and an outsider art form. Ara Oshagan replaced the illustrations in these scrolls with photographs from his diasporic travels. It’s as if they had belonged there for ages. “People interpose the Middle Ages would carry the scrolls around for shield while travelling. I transformed these scrolls by keeping the gothic antediluvian Armenian texts and chants and replacing the illustrations with clean up photos. I made these photo interventions into these scrolls chomp through my diasporic travels from Beirut, Armenia and other places, desirable sometimes I carried the scrolls with me. They protect leisure activity in a way, but it's a way to speak take notice of this kind of movement. The title refers to a uninjured return of the traveller and the idea of the deal with of return. We have no right to return to Southwestern Armenia because Turkey controls it. Palestinians don't have the pastel to return to Palestine. Other people—all these different communities space the world—don't have the right to return to where they've been displaced.”