The Armenian diaspora left deep scars on the population of the once-prosperous country. The genocide in the early 20th century drove thousands to many countries worldwide. Armenian-American visual artist Ara Oshagan, based in Los Angeles, has made many photographic artworks about the history of his ancestors. As a little boy, he had to flee from Lebanon. His work tells stories that have to be told about the diaspora. “Many communities worldwide lack the right to return to where they’ve been displaced.”

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Since childhood, Ara Oshagan lived with the stories of his ancestors’ displacement and dispossession. His grandfather was born in the Ottoman Empire, which at the time was Western Armenia, where Armenians lived for thousands of years. His grandfather, an intellectual and a writer, was jailed during the genocide in 1915. “He escaped several times and lived underground for about three years in Istanbul. He was part of the intellectual, literary, and cultural Armenian revival in Istanbul then. The genocide completely crushed the revival. He escaped the Ottoman Empire by learning German with a German dictionary, then disguising himself in the uniform of a German officer and leaving with the German army.”

Ara Oshagan has always felt disappointed that the Armenian Genocide and diaspora never gained widespread recognition. “The denial still happens even though the genocide is a very convincingly proven fact.”
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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 my mother. There was another tremendous revival of Armenian letters and cultures in Beirut. My father was also a writer, so 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 1975 crushed that. And then we fled from Beirut because of the war.”
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The Oshagan family fled to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. “That displacement, my own personal displacement, and the collective displacement of the communities I lived in have this kind of reverberating effect over my entire life.”
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Photography

The stories of displacement had to be told, and Ara Oshagan initially thought of becoming a writer, but he appeared to have a stronger connection to photography.

“I was writing actively for many years after graduating from school. I was writing about my displacement, which was probably unpopular then. While writing 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 relate to photography as my medium.”

Oshagan made documentary work that he could connect to his character. “It took me a while to make photography my personal expression, probably because I have this big shadow of my family looming over me, and I wanted to be a writer and kind of in that vein. It took me a while to accept that it's about what you want to say, not the medium. I completely embraced photography at that point.”
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Nagorno Karabagh

With the camera in his hand, Oshagan could tell the visual stories of his people, his family, and himself. He not only made single photographs but also made narratives with collage and film. “I tried to create my kind of visual language with photography. But in the last five or six years, my work has expanded into different ways of telling these narratives through collage and film. But language remains an important part. Western Armenian is on the UNESCO endangered list of languages because it has been diasporic for 100 years. My indigenous language is threatened. So, I also wanted to connect through language.”

The series Father Land was shot in Nagorno Karabagh—recently, the entire Armenian population there has been violently forced to leave—with his father, who wrote notes about the place in his diary. “Nagorno Karabagh was one of the few places in the world where Armenians could control where and how they lived. It was a lightning rod for us in the diaspora. When you're diasporic, the homeland is always in your imagination. My father and I went there to write this book. We didn't have a plan except for us to go, for me to take pictures and for him to write an essay.”
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Diasporic style

The early black-and-white photography of Oshagan has the wildly agile style of the photographer Gilles Peress, one of his photography heroes. “This style is diasporic and multicultural for me. The four identities I have are part of who I am. And there's this constant flux between them and sometimes in contention, sometimes mostly in harmony. That you live in the space you live in, the people you interact with.”

Oshagan needs to spend time with the people before shooting his pictures. The photographs were taken randomly, but they all form a mirror of the people's lives. “I have to get to know them. I must spend time with them. It takes a while for them to start ignoring my camera. Then I get the type of pictures I prefer.”
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Shushi Portraits

Ara Oshagan expanded his documentary style to include more artistic approaches. In his project, Shushi Portraits, he placed old Armenian manuscript reproductions behind portraits. In 2020, Azerbaijan violently invaded and re-colonised the indigenous Armenian region of Artsakh. “They also took the town Shushi to which I was connected. The portraits are of former residents of Shushi who have now been deracinated from their indigenous lands. I wondered how I could connect displaced people to their previous living spaces. These texts and pages from illuminated Bible manuscripts are from across Armenian highlands, including the Nagorno Karabagh. The pages are 600, 700, and 900 years old. They're religious texts that also speak about the culture and history of the displaced people. In this way, I want to bring them back to their homeland and culture.”

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Witnesses

One of the very early projects he did in collaboration with Levon Parian about the Armenian Genocide was iwitness. Oshagan and Parian photographed—in very close-up style—survivors of the early 20th-century genocide, living in Los Angeles and Detroit. The witnesses also told their stories that were placed by the portraits. The little stories that are printed near the images are disturbing. “We wanted to focus on portraiture—on the photography. Even though we collected all these oral histories, photography is still key. The portraits focus on the eyes because that's what they saw. The witnesses saw through their eyes. And the black background wipes out the current day context and replaces the context with this blackness.”

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Scrolls

The project That You May Return refers to the Hmayil, a scroll-shaped amulet with 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 in the Middle Ages would carry the scrolls around for protection while travelling. I transformed these scrolls by keeping the medieval Armenian texts and chants and replacing the illustrations with my photos. I made these photo interventions into these scrolls from my diasporic travels from Beirut, Armenia and other places, so sometimes I carried the scrolls with me. They protect me in a way, but it's a way to speak about this kind of movement. The title refers to a safe return of the traveller and the idea of the right of return. We have no right to return to Western Armenia because Turkey controls it. Palestinians don't have the right to return to Palestine. Other people—all these different communities in the world—don't have the right to return to where they've been displaced.”

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Ara Oshagan is a diasporic multi-disciplinary artist and curator whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession, legacies of violence, identity and imagined or unimagined futures. A descendant of communities uprooted from their indigenous land by genocide, Oshagan’s work is a consideration of the structure and potentiality of diasporic life. Oshagan has published three photobooks and presented his work at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, the International Center of Photography (ICP) and TedX Yerevan. His work has been featured on NPR, LA Times, Hyperallergic and Art Papers. Oshagan is a curator at the City of Glendale ReflectSpace Gallery in Los Angeles County.

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