Gregory Jundanian: Once There Was and Was Not

My grandparents, relatives and other survivors, knew instinctively that trauma could be passed down across generations, and tried to stop the wounds from festering by not talking about what they witnessed, their abject losses and the absence they must have felt at the very center of their beings. The past was omnipresent but seldom mentioned. It became a presence that manifested itself through absence, a haunting that was at the core of who we were. The history of genocide had a profound effect on generations of Armenians and arguably still does today.

In 2019, I went to Armenia and Nagorno Karabagh to begin exploring how to photograph the idea of Armenian identity. I began a body of work called In Their Footsteps…An Identity Fractured by Genocide. I was to work there extensively, but Covid and the war with Azerbaijan broke out. I returned to the United States and started an archival project, the Armenians of Whitinsville, to honor the people of my community, and continued to explore the topic of Armenian identity in the diaspora.

In a book form, Once There Was and Was Not will be comprised of my photographs along with vintage community photographs of people once precious and now forgotten, writings taken from interviews, and newspaper clippings from the early 1900’s, all to contextualize the present.

The photographs have been created in the Blackstone River Valley of Massachusetts, and comprise a series of reflections strung together to explore the absence, abandonment and estrangement I felt as a child, but didn’t understand. The photographs focus on the landscapes of the area, the mills that drew Armenians here for work, and the community of the people that remain. It is a survival story in an aftermath of a genocide some 110 plus years later.

Daniel George: To begin, tell us more about the beginnings of Once There Was and Was Not. What led you to create this work that is rooted in your cultural identity?

Gregory Jundanian: I’ve always been fascinated by the need for community, what makes up a community, the visual markers of a community, and how this all plays into one’s identity. Before focusing on my heritage and photographing in the places where I grew up, I worked on a number of different community-based projects. My first project was working with poets in the Boston spoken word community, then photographing underground basement hip hop concerts and finally working with different barbershops across greater Boston, each barbershop a separate community. While I enjoy creating other types of work, it’s this work around the concept of community and identity that I love.

I started to think about why I was drawn to the concept of community, and began to reflect on my personal journey growing up in what was at the time the remnants of an Armenian refugee community in central Massachusetts. I loved where I grew up, but given our history and heritage, Armenians were set apart to some extent. Our culture, family and friends were an enormous part of our identity, yet we were in New England in the 50’s and 60’s, and not unlike today, differences were not always celebrated.

I did not think about what this all meant when I was younger. It just was. However, I made the decision to first explore this by photographing in Artsakh (Nagorno Karabagh) and in the Gyumri area of Armenia in 2019. The idea was to think about what represents the core of our culture, what survived after both the Genocide and the Soviet Union, and who we are today in what is the now the homeland. Unfortunately, war with Azerbaijan broke out with disastrous consequences for Armenians. That war, along with the outbreak of COVID, forced me to rethink my approach. I decided to continue to explore these same issues around identity and the diaspora, but do so where I grew up in central Massachusetts.

It was more difficult to do this than I originally thought. To be immersed in the familiar with all the baggage of the past, and at the same time create work with a fresh point of view was a challenge. I started a community archival website with childhood friends called the Armenians of Whitinsville as a gift to the community, but also thinking that it would inform my work. It certainly did to some extent, but the website took on a life of its own.

Working on the website provided clarity around how to approach this issue for me. I’d meet with people across town, speak to them about their lives, scan their photographs and documents and photograph their memory objects if they had any. The site provided them the opportunity for people to tell their story before it disappeared. This was important because many Armenians feel that they have been forgotten. The genocide of the Armenians is commonly referred to as the Forgotten Genocide. Until President Biden recognized the Genocide in 2021, many Armenians had resigned themselves to the possibility of it never being recognized. With that sense came the feeling that we as a people had been forgotten; that the Ottomans had ultimately been successful.

I learned here that photography is as much as act of listening as it was an act of visualization.

DG: In your statement, you write that memories of the Armenian Genocide were “omnipresent but seldom mentioned” in your childhood. This leads me to consider your creative vision for this project—and revisiting this aspect of your life through a developed perspective. Would you talk about this convergence of memory? As you were making these photographs, did anything new come to your awareness?

GJ: The convergence of memory is at the heart of my work. Many people come from a past where certain things were never fully named. In some families it’s migration, in others it’s war, trauma, or even the quiet sacrifices made to simply survive. That unspoken legacy becomes part of one’s internal landscape, like one is carrying stories never told, but somehow known. For me it was genocide, it’s history and the aftermath.

That the Armenian Genocide was “omnipresent but seldom mentioned” in my childhood reflects a kind of silence that was charged with an unspoken tension. It shaped everything from the way my family told stories, the food we cooked, to the sense of displacement that lingered in our home and surrounding community. Even though we were proudly Americans, my father, who was born in the United States, on many occasions told us that he wished he could have grown up in Turkey, with his family intact and memories not laced with such tragedy.

The times when elders spoke about their experiences in any detail were the exception. Their silence wasn’t about forgetting; it was about protecting the next generation from pain. This realization influenced how I approached the work. I wasn’t just documenting landscapes or heirlooms or family members, but photographing the residue of memory, the in-between spaces where what’s felt is stronger than what’s said. The personal and collective can also blur. I’d look through the lens and sometimes feel like I was seeing not just my own story, but my ancestors’ grief, strength, and longing. The photographs became a conversation between the past and present, between silence and voice.

We have a past before we are even born. This wasn’t something new that came to me, but it continually struck me that there is an arbitrariness to life that starts at birth. We are born as innocents, but then inherit the memories of our parents, our ancestors and our community. We are then deeply influenced by the identity of our family and community for the balance of our lives.

The paradox is that in the end we are eventually forgotten. There is a beauty to that which may seem hard to reconcile with work about memory, but it was this thinking that evolved for me while creating this work. I see the struggle for identity as an affirmation of life, and work about memory, whether archival or artistic, is a form of intimacy with something ephemeral.

DG: I was drawn to your depiction of the Armenian community through landscape, interiors, portraiture, and archival imagery, and find myself thinking about all this as it relates to the idea of the houshamadyan. Would you expand on this tradition and why you felt it was important to approach your personal memory book in such an extensive manner?

GJ: I believe that the concept of the houshamadyan or memory book is unique to the Armenian culture, and a vital touchstone for me throughout this project. Traditionally, a houshamadyan was created by survivors and descendants of the Armenian Genocide to document the history and life in their lost ancestral towns of central and eastern Turkey, i.e., the customs, dialects, recipes, songs, even the layout of villages. It wasn’t just about mourning what was lost, it was a way of resurrecting it on the page, stitching memory back together through collective remembrance. These writings were a recording of the past in an attempt to act as guides to our future identities in the diaspora. Very few, though, have been translated into English. They were written in the western Armenian dialect, ironically a language that is currently endangered. (The Library of Congress has a collection of some 200.)

There is a beauty inherent in the fragility of memory. These books represent that to me. They resist erasure knowing full well that eventually we are all forgotten. We are all rooted in pasts that have changed dramatically. In my case, it was a town in central Massachusetts. What I remember most were my family, friends and a community heavily influenced by the experience of those still living who had experienced genocide. It seemed fitting to borrow from this rich tradition to speak visually to how, generations later, things have changed and yet remained the same.

My own experience, however, as a diasporic Armenian two generations removed from the Genocide, meant that my approach had to be different. I didn’t inherit intact memories. I inherited fragments. I felt compelled to approach this personal memory book in an extensive and layered way, through landscapes, interiors, portraits, and archival materials. Each mode offered a different texture of memory. Landscapes held absence and distance. Interiors carried the intimacy of domestic life and generational continuity. Portraiture gave voice to presence and survival. And archival imagery provided a connective tissue to a broader collective story. I tried to use all these elements to let the photographs echo and contradict each other and to create a space where memory is both personal and inherited, fractured and whole.

DG: I am interested to hear more about the writings and interviews that accompany this work. Would you talk about the process of collecting those? What do you feel they offer this project in addition to the visual component?

GJ: The writings that accompany this work come from a mix of advertisements made in search of lost family members placed in Armenian newspapers at the time, diaries and shoeboxes filled with letters. The interviews used were conducted with survivors in the early 80’s and then with their descendants interviewed more recently for the Armenians of Whitinsville project. I have not settled yet on how to best use these materials, but feel that they, along with the photographs of the unknowns, are fragments of the collective memory that provide important context for my work.

While people may feel the sadness and sense of estrangement in the work, few will know what it’s about. Most people know very little about this history, and so are not going to understand my work with any intimacy. The narratives and vernacular photographs can provide this dimension.

DG: Since today is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, it is important to recognize the approximately 1.5 million Armenians that were killed or died from exposure, disease, dehydration or starvation at the hand of Ottoman Empire authorities—as well as the generations of individuals effected by these atrocities. This may be a broad question, but why do you believe the photographic medium lends itself to exploring the lingering traumatic effects of events like these? Why is it important to visualize this, for you personally?

GJ: Photography has a unique capacity to hold space for memory, especially when it comes to historical trauma like the Armenian Genocide. It doesn’t just document; it evokes. It brings us closer to experiences we could never fully understand otherwise. The stillness of a photo can feel almost reverent, like a pause in time where we’re asked not just to look, but to witness.

When it comes to exploring lingering trauma across generations, photography can show the after which is often invisible: the portraits of people forgotten, the preserved landscapes once walked by those who vanished, the eyes of descendants who carry memory in their blood. In this way, photography becomes a bridge between personal memory and collective history.

Genocides are not just physical atrocities. They are attacks on memory, lineage, and identity. For me personally, the power of visualizing this trauma is an act of confrontation. Visual representation pushes back against this.

(https://lenscratch.com is an online platform dedicated to photography. This interview appeared online on April 24.)