A Search for Meaning and Identity in Diaspora 

I am a photographer, photojournalist and senior lecturer in the Communication, Journalism & Media Department at Suffolk University in Boston where I teach photography, photojournalism, and a Global Studies course called Visuals in Global Contexts. I’ve also led study abroad classes in Photojournalism to Senegal, Italy, Spain, and taught a photojournalism summer course at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan. In each program, after learning photography basics we moved into visual narratives on various aspects of the host cultures and produced photo essays that together in exhibit formed a major impression of the students’ immersive observations.  

My personal project is a “long-form” photo documentary based on observations and related learning about the origins and history of my own family, early Armenian immigrants, and the greater experience of immigrant Armenians who found their way to the United States, between the late 1800s and the present, and how they established themselves living between two worlds, the early Ottoman Armenian and the American. A second generation born in the United States, I became interested in the stories of elders and others and always thought there was a greater story to be told.  Bringing attention to a small and under-represented national group in contemporary culture and its’ grievances and aspirations became an interest for me and I began a search for identity and meaning in the milieu.  

A formal approach began while studying history, and later photography, in college and professional school. Prepared with research skills and professional photography and media understanding I decided to take an approach of actively engaging with old and new immigrant groups and organizations for a focused visual study. I became active in attending group and community meetings, political protests, art and music events, and visiting friends and families. I also worked at an Armenian studies institute for three years archiving a vintage photo collection and providing professional photography services such as documenting events and making photographs for publications and oral histories. The work and experience gained at the institute helped me to understand the cultural and intellectual production of many of the scholars and their working methods for their presentations to members and the public. 

Starting and continuing with the history of my own family from photographs and narrative style photo albums in my possession, and others provided by extended family, I was able to learn who the ancestors, many of them unknown to me, were. Other materials include news articles, a photo postcard collection in Armenian, ancestry and DNA results, immigration documents and more. These paralleled the larger group experience. 

Several exhibits of my photographs on this subject have been exhibited over the years on the East and West coasts in galleries and cultural centers, and much of the work has appeared in publication, in both ethnic press and elsewhere. 

The goal of the work is a book with accompanying interactive website presenting my collected items and photographs made about social, political, economic and religious aspects of one small immigrant group that arrived in several waves from other branches of the Armenian Diaspora including Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and the former Soviet Union with people making  their way in a new world.  

Some of the style ideas and influences, what I consider good forms of successful visual communication and storytelling in search of truths on  a national or international level, include photographer Corky Lee’s Asian-Americans*, Susan Meiselas’s Nicaragua and Kurdistan*, Arthur Tcholakian’s Soviet Period Armenia* also Gerda Taro and Robert Capa’s* coverage of the Spanish Civil War*, Dorothea Lange’s* Depression Era  truths through her lens. These photographers worked to tell what they considered true depictions of the national groups and subjects they reported on through photography. 

In this brief slide presentation, many of the subjects are activists and others are ordinary people. All of them take time from their daily careers and lives to make public expressions of unity and solidarity in their own geographic regions and with others around the worldwide Armenian Diaspora. 

Slide 1, the title slide has two photographs, one in Washington DC in 1912, of the Kevorkian's of Constantinople (Istanbul), my grandmother Mare and her brothers Vahram “William” and Kevork “George”. Mare was married in Egypt in 1903 and proceeded to Worcester, and her brothers followed in 1906. All became Americans.  The second photo of the brothers, Mare, and the rest of the growing Martin family with husband Harry “Aroutiun” Martin. Mare gave birth to four girls and four boys. 

Slide 2 shows the entire Martin family, including chain migration members, enjoying picnic time together with friends of the early Armenian “colony” of Worcester. They are holding Turkish coffee demi tasse cups, an old and daily tradition for Armenians.  

Slide 3, a grouping of family and group photos, including one of a young William Kevorkian dressed as an Armenian Fedayee freedom fighter. Location of the photo, old or new country, is unknown. 

Slide 4, Harry Martin’s World War I registration card, and his business cards with old world scenes and symbols from his growing oriental carpet repair, cleaning, and sales business. The first of its kind in Worcester, Massachusetts, he also opened branches in New York and Washington, D.C., with his brothers-in-law, as managers. 

Slide 5, comprises of a few of many articles published in the local press about Harry Martin’s journey through Europe to Egypt in 1903 for his marriage (once leaving the Ottoman Empire, Armenian men were not allowed to return for fear of them spreading revolution against the Sultan), the Christening of his first born son in 1910, his receipt and delivery of books about Armenian history from the Mekhitarist Catholic Monastery of Venice and Vienna to local college presidents and dignitaries in Worcester. He became the order’s representative in the United States.

Slide 6 shows some press in English and Armenian about some of my exhibits of photographs from the project. 

Slide 7 is the beginning of my contemporary photographs with the close up portrait title slide of a couple showing great concern at a demonstration at the United Nations in support of Lebanese-Armenians, and  was selected keeping in mind the continuity through time of Armenian life in America, of forming identities, and the pull of the past guiding towards an imagined and uncertain future. Dual flags play an important role.

Slide 8 has two national flags prepared for marchers to carry. People often hesitate, not sure which banner to pick up. These marches either in commemoration of the 1915 tragedy or in protest of human rights violations of Armenians and other victims of racial hatred have been taking place around the world since the 1960s. In the United States many nationalities were influenced to speak out and act by the example of the Civil Rights Movement of African Americans. 

Slide 9. Protest, at the United Nations shows that Armenians began to realize that an element of street theater and drama using large signs and making a loud noise was important in trying to get attention from the world powers in hopes of making right the historic wrong. 

Slide 10. During Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day at the State House in Boston, a new generation of youth have taken up the cause with photographs of their relatives who were survivors of the massacres and pogroms in Turkey and the immigrant generation in America. 

Slide 11. Young folk dancers at Camp Haiastan (Armenian for Armenia), founded in the 1940s in Franklin, MA, a combined summer day camp and site for large community picnics and dances for New England churches and organizations. The founders wanted to instill an Armenian spirit and commitment for new generations.  Here young women take part in a traditional dance presentation during a Boston community church picnic gathering. 

Slide 12. With older women dancing years later at the Armenian Heritage Park on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, during an annual Genocide commemoration, as part of the event including vocalists, prominent speakers and local, state, and national politicians. 

Slide 13. As great grandchildren of the survivors attend Armenian Heritage Park events, perhaps for the first time they are experiencing cultural aspects of Armenian Community life and may perhaps carry on in the future. 

Slide 14. Elders usually stayed at home during some events requiring distant travel. My maternal grandfather, Garabed Harabedian, was born in 1888, in Bursa, Turkey. I photographed him during my photography school days while practicing portraiture. He lived his last years in Worcester, Massachusetts, in a small house next door to our family home. Our grandmother had died two years before, and he loved having visitors.  

He was taken into the Turkish army as a young man and avoided death by his government when Armenian soldiers were disarmed and killed, because during World War One, he was sent to Mosul in today’s Iraq, to fight against the British and Arab invasion. His portrait in uniform is above him in the photograph. While outside of the immediate killing zone in Turkey he happened by a train station and saw Armenians packed in cattle cars headed into the desert and he realized he could not help. He soon left the army and joined British then French forces, meeting his wife to be in the meantime, and being assisted by the French to leave for France and onward to America. He died in 1979, an American citizen and a free man. 

Slide 15. Mrs. Asdaghig (Star) Alemian’s caption is fairly complete with the slide. She was a very popular person in E. Weymouth, in greater Boston, and lived until 109. Here and in the subsequent few years she attended the annual Genocide commemoration on April 24, at the Massachusetts State House and was honored by Governor Baker for her senior position in Massachusetts and her lifetime dedication to the State and the Armenian Community. 

Slide 16.  Again, dual flags and identities, this time with masks during the Covid 19 Pandemic, held by a woman. Everyone is paying attention to news of the announcement that President Biden has officially recognized as Genocide the actions of Turkey during the killings and expulsions of the indigenous Armenians from their homeland in 1915 and after. 

Slide 17.  As a closing image, somewhat photo essay formulaic, a father and daughter walking through Boston Common with an Armenian Tricolor flag and into the future together. 

I’ve tried to select photographs, only a few from a great many over time, that present the issue of the search for identity and meaning by the subjects and the photographer. Even the vintage photographs and ephemera portray this. If photographs can reveal universal truths, the truth in each image is that people want to be loyal to the past and the certainty that they were indigenous and good people living  their lives, only to lose their families and properties and  be cast to the winds and  deportation spread over the globe to create second lives in foreign lands. In each photo there is some symbol of that past that makes the individual different from their host country even while adapting to new ways.  Photographs, clothing, flags, fonts, demi-tasse coffee cups and more, visually all in an American background. 

I think just being honest with the camera and trying to avoid propaganda style photos, if that’s possible at all, works best. Images of ordinary people and families seeking some justice in history and the world against the great and powerful. The right photos can reveal the true nature of this group, certainly one of the oldest left on the planet, carriers of   ancient DNA and human experience, not some inferior beings that some feel even today should be culturally and physically erased. 

I feel being present and witness, with camera, heart and mind, at the right time in the right places can best define this and any story visually, as photographers and journalists often say, on the front lines of history.  

*Berger, John: Another Way of Telling, A Seventh Man, Ways of Seeing 

  Capa, Robert: Slightly Our of Focus 

  Lee, Corky: Asian-Americans_50 Years of Photographic Justice 

  Meiselas, Susan: Kurdistan, In the Shadows of History 

  Mirak, Robert: Torn Between Two Lands, Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I.  

  Rogovska, Jane: Gerda Taro, Inventing Robert Capa 

  Tcholakian, Arthur: Armenia: State, People, Life