Left - Emily : Inside "Gitelik Hamalsaran" or "The University of Knowledge" in Yeghegnadzor.
Left - Emily : This time of year the sun sets right as people are getting off work and picking up groceries before heading home. I was caught today by the nice fading light the movement of people and cars around the city and the chance encounters with friends in the street.
Right - Emily : Zoya works in a small room just off the shortcut I take into town every day. She says she learned how to sew when she was 17 at classes she the cultural house in Yeghegnadzor over 30 years ago. She along with her soviet era sewing machine patch up dozens of articles of clothing a day.
Right - Emily : Artush is my landlord Samvel's son. Trying to be just like his handyman dad, Artush is always following Samvel around hammering nails, washing the car and shoveling piles of dirt.
Left - Emily : My counterpart's mother, Gaya, always cracks me up when I go to visit them. I brought my camera along with me the other day, as I am working on this project, and started to take her picture. She obliged, then left the room for a few minutes and came back dressed in her finest clothes and asked me to take her "death picture." That is, when a person in the family dies, they place a photo in a black frame on the wall in remembrance. I couldn't get her to break out of a pose, nor to laugh so I kept telling her smile, don't stand so still don't stare at the camera but she wouldn't break, she would just give me a little slap on the face and smirk.
Left - Emily: Serian, the guard at the university, is one face I see almost every day. He sits in a small room with just a table, phone, chair and a small bed at the bottom of the stairs of 
Left - Emily : My house sits right in the part of town that the sun hits just before it tucks itself under the mountain for the evening. This time of year, as the light spills across my once abundant garden, over the yellow crunchy leaves and right through my front door, is my favorite.
Left - Me : I haven't been bowling in a long time, but I have seen The Big Lebowski recently so it kind of felt like it hadn't been that long since I ran one in the gutter. My game has improved though, a double strike was witnessed and revered from my fellow bowlers tonight.
Left - Emily : Armen owns the store we foreigners like to call "Bah Vonts." Bah vonts in Armenian means "of course," and we call his store as such because anytime you ask if he has something in stock, he says "bah vonts," or something like "of course we have what you're asking for, what kind of store do you think I run?!" Armen also makes the best homemade wine you can buy. Every time I walk in the door he greets me with an ear to ear smile, throws in a reference to how we are "barekam" or relatives and asks if I want four liters of wine today or ten.
Emily: Everyday on the walk into town I pass these tatiks sitting on their bench outside their homes. Satik, left, lives alone and after a year of saying hello to her every day she has just now started saying hello back. Emma, right, is notorious for cornering me on the street or in the store while munching on walnuts and telling me stories about her relatives that live all over the world. The two are always very curious about me, my activities and the numerous foreign guests I bring by their bench. This is the first time I've taken their portraits.
Emily: Catching a cold in Armenia, according to Armenians can happen a lot of ways. As a result, most Armenians are very weary about getting cold themselves. Slippers and socks must be worn at all times, when sitting on cement you must put something under you for fear of becoming sterile and an open window in a house causing a draft could be one of the biggest contributing factors to colds in Armenia.
Me: It has been a really a busy Monday and time moves fast, especially in America. The light this man was working under with the dust and the leaves was the prettiest thing I saw all day while on my way to get groceries this evening.
Me: This is my sister, taken at night at my Grandmother's house. We used to share a bed when we were little and always at least a room after sharing a bed. We are night and day in personality, but when we are both together like this, alone, we end up talking until the both of us eventually don't have to say anything about being too tired and then we turn over and fall asleep. It's also about the moment that we get before we turn off the lights, the half hour or so that magazines and books soothe us into a slumber and we think about all that is possible
Emily: The first snow of the year on the mountains above Yeghegnadzor.
I took this picture this past Spring in Armenia, and now that the weather is beginning to turn and the winds are picking up I start to think about how cold I was there and how many nights I spent in my clothes and how many mornings I huddled around my gas oven staring at the wall hoping for the clouds to break. I always liked this picture, but I never got around to using it. It's incredibly weird how distant my past existence there seems now. Anyway my friend Emily (who is still in Armenia) and I have a project we are going to announce in a week, it will be pretty cool so I hope you come back to see. Till then.....drink good coffee and smile more often.
“At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. We can see people, pictures, landscapes, and whatever else we need to see, and with the help of science we can see galaxies, viruses, and the insides of our own bodies. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought.
Each one of those ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order not to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in passions–jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in an affect–in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis not mechanism.” - James Elkins, The Object Stares Back
My previous backyard mountain view I had in Armenia has dwindled in scale and impressiveness from just that - mountains, to an urban lawn with a shed and a tree. A big change I am still waking up to every morning. But today while sitting outside listening to the rain come down these two yellow chairs hit me with something. They looked pretty all of a sudden. I like chairs sitting next to each other, I think they are personally animated in a way. Two chairs hold two people and when they leave, the chairs hold their past - the story. Easy enough. I hope you, as well as me, get a chance to sit with someone this weekend, tell a story or just listen to one.
So it was a small town rodeo and fair, and it was a moving place - full of teenagers out on the prowl, cowboys standing in line for another can of beer, horses wide eyed in prancing nervousness, kids of all ages just running around. A nice place to be with a camera.
I grew up this way. My Mother was more than encouraging for my siblings and I to get into riding horses, we had at least 4 around at all times to "help us also love them" as much as she did. I am still a little frightened by a horse, but at the same time in awe of their power, gentleness and constant smell.
Of course the workers at the fair are just as novel, perhaps, for their lifestyle choice and pleading with kids to keep taking whacks at a some balloon that will never result in them winning a giant stuffed animal.
I watched this girl's face as she watched her friends ride the Zipper. You should know this ride, it's loopy and sickening to look at - her face lit up by the glow of thrill was too much to pass up.
A great place to be for a night, the rodeo. And no better destination than your own small town in Texas.
Luke is the barn hand at the boarding ranch my mother uses for her horse. I've only "known" him for about 2 years, and have been interested in photographing him for about as long. Single, he lives alone on this ranch tending to the horses 7 days a week.
He wakes up at 5, begins feeding and turning the horses out from their stalls, goes back home for breakfast and a shave, and returns to begin cleaning up after them and all the duties in between. He says the worst part of his job is when he has to help put a horse down.
Originally from a small town in North Carolina, Luke left his family farm at age 20 after his father died and hasn't returned. His sense of humor rivals the day in day out work of caring for horses as he jokes about being kidnapped by a pretty woman and never returning.
He doesn't leave the ranch very often, in fact he says he would like to drive in to San Antonio (45 minutes down the highway) to see his old friends but that that would cost him too much in gas, and he just "don't" have the time or money for that. With a heavy draw of a southern accent, he fits right in this scene and for the last 25 years says he is happy to be doing what he does with the horses - making sure they're alright.
There are no limits of personal boundary or curiousity with this girl. A young girl, 7 years old, although she will tell you she is in her late twenties and is the so called pop celebrity star Hannah Montana. I have had a blast talking to her, answering her questions like, "you're so skinny, are you this skinny in real life?" and asking a few of my own. I'm glad I could jump in on the tail end of summer in Texas, to dive in a body of water that is clean, to teach a kid how to swim and be privy to summer celebrities in my own backyard.
It has only been 2 or 3 weeks since I left Armenia, and I find myself perplexed at how fast it has become a memory. While I am happy to be home, to be with my family and good friends, to sleep in air conditioning, to eat anything I want anytime - I miss the landscape of Armenia, the spoken language and just being there. After compiling about 30 of my favorite images from my 2 years there (I should have way more, but inch anem?) I am thinking about ways to exhibit them and introduce Americans to the social and cultural world of Armenia. But mostly I just wanted to post another photo, to create something, maybe to hold on to something, to find a tiny escape from the tumbling change that my life is going through. These pictures come from a small village near the Georgian border, Bagratashen.
There is so much of this experience that cannot be translated into the language of someone who hasn't been through it - but it has certainly been the best thing I have done so far. It's an interesting process, living outside your country for a few years and noticing the kinds of changes that brings about in you. The kind of duality you can feel for two very different places, both familiar to you like the home you were brought up in, has amazed me and taught me good things about how much a person can adapt to. I wanted to take a photo of something for you, something that would be more cornerstone-ish to the way I feel right now. But my computer has been sold, and is going through a Russian makeover tomorrow and I will not have anymore time or access to post to this blog. So I decided this image would do. The Armenian writing on the mustache says "Congratulations every day", but translated further into an understandable English phrase would say "Every day is a day to celebrate."And from what I have learned here, it is. A Tuesday afternoon is just as good as a Friday night and there are a million reasons to be thankful as well as to slow down. I don't know how much longer I will keep this blog, it's a nice place to breathe, but I don't know. In any case, thank you for taking the time to read it and look at my photos. I hope to take photography more seriously when I return. I have had the time to read many books - like everyone in PC - and the last paragraph I read in "Interpreter of Maladies" really struck an obvious yet ineffably important chord with me and what I can't say I think Jhumpa Lahiri says perfectly.
I have about 2 weeks left in Armenia, the end has come. I am photographing the little things that I have found oddly charming but never thought they could really tell anyone much about Armenia. Like this bed, that struck me as a possible metaphor for what I've come to know about this country, which carries a simple austere beauty that reflects the waiting I feel like people are doing here. Waiting for the day to pass, the seeds to grow, a job to materialize, a child to be born, the next pension paycheck to arrive. It's a post Soviet country that has been torn apart by Communism and is still struggling to recover from the abandonment. Slowly things are getting better, but not for everyone. Outside of Yerevan, the people of this country sit waiting.....for something to happen.
There is still a wonderful spirit here - an identity that is very strong and persistent. And with this, I hope, there will be more on the coming horizon.
14 going on 15. An age that drives most parents crazy, I think I was guilty of the same. I talked my parents into letting me date a boy they said I couldn't - and these girls are just coming in to the realm of all that. My neighbor's daughter, Narine, feels more comfortable behind a pair of sunglasses or her own hand, but at the same time is really interested in her own image. I took these today to illustrate that time in a girls life of becoming a woman, and also just to take some for them to have. I know these girls well, they are always gossiping in the street texting on their cell phones and knocking on my door - so it wasn't particularly hard to get them in the frame. They're so grown up.
Kids are fun to photograph, they love the camera. But they desperately want to try to take a photo with it, all by themselves, like little adults. I learned a good lesson today - don't let them. My lens already a little broken from my own mistake is now hardly hanging on the body of my camera as it was dropped out of the hands of a little girl today. Ay kez ban, at least I have a trip to the States coming up soon. Repair? I wonder how much $$ I am looking at.
