Oshagan and Oshagan’s Take on Karabagh: A World Of Images and Words

He sometimes gets what he seeks in one shot. Other times, “I may take many frames. I will not know whether I have made a good image or not. Sometimes I think I made a great image, but it is not really good, or the opposite can happen. When I’m actually making the image it is instinctual.” Afterwards, the advice of a good editor with some distance from the work can be helpful.

Ara Oshagan never formally studied photography. He works as a geophysicist during the day, but has a flexible work schedule and tries to work on his photography as much as possible. He grew up as a child in the Armenian environment of Beirut and when he came to the US with his family, he moved around a lot, living in places like Madison, Wis. or Memphis, Tenn., without much contact with Armenian communities. He feels this made him understand marginalization and gave him an identity with several dimensions. He declared, “A diasporan identity is about not just being Armenian, but something else too: between languages, between Armenian and English, between different ways of thinking. The diaspora exists in a middle space.”

With a father and a grandfather (Hagop Oshagan) who were famous writers, Ara Oshagan initially attempted to express himself through writing, though he studied physics in order to have a practical profession to support his artistry. Then, something changed, he said: “At some point I stumbled onto photography and I realized that it is a better medium for me. I was able to connect with the medium very quickly and easily and make pictures that were significant for me, much more easily than writing. It took me a while: there was a struggle for a while between writing and photography, but I realized that it was not the medium but what you are trying to do through the medium. I went into photography as my art — my life.”

Ara Oshagan felt that coming from a lineage of writers is a double-edged sword: “On the one hand, you have this momentum — two generations of authors and artists giving you a push forward into certain ways of thinking and creating and appreciating art. You have all these things you know firsthand and intuitively that other people perhaps must struggle to obtain. On the other hand, there is the issue of coming out of the shadow. People like my father and grandfather cast long and heavy shadows.”

Vahé Oshagan in a way became a poet to distinguish himself from his famous novelist father. When Ara Oshagan still thought of becoming a novelist, he wanted to write in English instead of Armenian, but then went into the totally different medium of photography. He added, “I think that one of the results of having artists in previous generations is that your maturation seems to take longer. My father did not publish his first book until he was in his 30s; I’m 46 now with my first book out.”

Some things appear to have been passed down through three generations, Ara Oshagan found: “There is a spirit of breaking rules that came from my grandfather. My father took that spirit, and introduced curse words and conversational language into Armenian poetry for the first time. In a way, my style of photography also tends to break a lot of rules, in terms of images being very easily understood….I did not do that very consciously, but when I first started taking pictures, I was doing it in that way. I realized I was doing it and developed it further later.” A second shared element is being open-minded and accepting of everything that comes your way.

Most of Ara Oshagan’s work concerns Armenians. He attempts to avoid an overt nationalistic agenda, as he is exploring his own community in order to talk about people in general. Oshagan said, “I think the bad part of nationalism or the thing that subverts art is to have an agenda, when you are trying to pursue a nationalistic cause through your art. But you can love your nation and do projects about Armenians, and choose to do it through an active witnessing through photography, exploring without a particular agenda, as in Karabagh, I don’t see a contradiction.” He added that “visual language is very different from written — it can distance you from obvious, clear nationalistic elements.”

As a Diasporan-Armenian now living in Glendale, Ara Oshagan has done photography projects about survivors of the Armenian Genocide and Los Angeles-area Armenians, and still, he says, “there is a constant idea or need for return within me. One of my grand projects is to document, through a self- reflective project, the Armenian Diaspora, not only in LA, but in Beirut, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Kessab, the faces of the diaspora — the face of our transnational nation which will reveal itself somehow. I would be able to explore that aspect of my identity. It is about looking at myself, my own community, the diaspora. What does it mean to be a transnational people? What I want to address is humanity, and issues about community and memory, through my work and through the Armenian community.”

Ara Oshagan has four more photography books ready to be published and samples of his work can be viewed in the permanent collections of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Fla., the Downey Museum of Art in Downey, Calif. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Yerevan. To find out more, visit http://araoshagan.com/.