28 COOL & NOTEWORTHY
10 Movses Haneshyan is 105 years of age. Wearing a
black coat, and with a cane in his hand, he stands
in front of a life-size canvas photograph of a
landscape, propped up in a vast, open landscape.
Survivors of the Haneshyan stares at the canvas, at a winding
rubble road, a fir-tree forest, distant mountains
20th century’s and a deep blue sky. He begins to cry, and then to
sing: “My home. My Armenia.” He runs his hands
on the momentary exposure of light in the image,
first genocide then kisses his fingers, as if to summon up the
power to return.
are reunited The photographer Diana Markosian has
set up this moment – Haneshyan last saw his
with their home when he was five. He was forced to flee
during what Armenians call Medz Yeghern
homeland
(the ‘Great Crime’) of 1915 – the systematic
ethnic cleansing of the Armenian people in
their historic homeland, which now lies in
Turkey. It was the first genocide of the 20th
century, and the total number murdered has
been estimated at between 800,000 and 1.5
million. To date, 29 countries have officially
recognised the killings as genocide, but the
Turkish government only partially acknowledges
it, and many Turkish people are willing to
by tom seymour cooperate with the conspiracy.
JANUARY 2016
028-031_01.16_BJP.indd 28
Haneshyan and his father survived and, as
part of her portrait of him, Markosian has
recorded his memories of that time. Soldiers
entered his village, he says. He was with his
father, holding his hand. “Half the road was
covered with dead people.”
Markosian is something of a prodigy. At the
age of 20, as her contemporaries contemplated
their latest hangover, she earned her master’s
degree at Columbia University’s Graduate
School of Journalism. Since then she’s worked
in some of the most remote corners of the
world, and published her work in The New York
Times, The New Yorker and Time. This year her
stunning revisitation of the Beslan massacre was
serialised by The Sunday Times Magazine. Getty
Images also approached, and asked her to join its
prestigious Reportage agency.
When I first contact Markosian, she’s just
given a talk at the Frontline Club in west London;
when she replies to my message, 48 hours later,
she’s just run a marathon in Iraq. A few days
later, she’s calling from New York. Markosian is
loosely based in Istanbul but rarely spends any
time there. She has plans, imminently, in Havana,
after she’s dropped in on Paris Photo.
17/11/2015 16:34

Markosian is herself Armenian – her
ancestors survived the genocide, and her parents
met at university in Armenia. They soon left the
country though, and Markosian spent the first
seven years of her life in Moscow; when her
mother decided to leave her father, they moved
to California. Markosian’s unusual history has
closely informed her personal work, starting
with Inventing My Father, which traced her
attempts to track him down and reconnect.
Having last seen him in 1996, she found him in
2013, once again living in Armenia.
“I have few childhood memories of him,” she
writes in her introduction to the series. “In one,
we are dancing together in our tiny apartment
in Moscow. In another, he is leaving. My father
would disappear for months at a time. Then,
unexpectedly, he would come home. Until, one
day, it was our turn to leave... My mother woke
me up and told me to pack my belongings. She
said we were going on a trip, and the next
morning we arrived in our new home, in
California. We never said goodbye to my father.”
The series honed Markosian’s understanding of
photography, and in particular of how she could
use it to explore her emotions, her intellect and
028-031_01.16_BJP.indd 29
COOL & NOTEWORTHY
her identity. “Photography is an expression of
myself: all of my feelings, revealed in a moment,
in an image,” she told BJP when she was selected
for the Ones to Watch issue in 2015.
It also taught her how photography can be
used collaboratively, incorporating multiple
perspectives, to become a conversation, or a
kaleidoscope of different viewpoints. “When we
reconnected suddenly – having not seen each
other for 15 years – taking pictures helped me
work through the abyss that existed between
us,” she said at the launch of her exhibition
at London’s 71a gallery. “But when I asked my
father what he thought of the piece, he said it
was missing his voice. That forced me to rethink
the way I approach my work, which can often
just be an expression of my own experiences,
rather than a shared journey.
“Having a connection with the people I
photograph is everything to me,” she continued
in her speech at 71a. “I sometimes wish it wasn’t
as important. It would almost make things more
convenient, for one. I could go on assignment,
make images and return to my life. But for some
reason that’s never quite enough. I need more than
a beautiful image to fulfil me as a photographer.
JANUARY 2016
29
It doesn’t always need to be a connection as
intimate as the work I did on my father, but if I
don’t connect, it shows. My work becomes surface
level, and I guess that’s my biggest fear as a
photographer – making work that is average.”
In that sense her next project, 1915, grew out
of Inventing My Father, allowing Markosian to
explore her cultural heritage by meeting three
Armenian genocide survivors. All three fled
the territory after the mass killing, and none
has ever returned. Finding them wasn’t easy; a
web of silence remains over the genocide, and
enquiring about it – particularly with the Turkish
authorities – is dangerous. So Markosian searched
Turkish voter registration records for people born
before 1915; finding 20 addresses, she travelled the
country and knocked on their doors. She located
10 survivors and spent time with three of them
– Movses Haneshyan, Yepraksia Gevorgyan and
Mariam Sahakyan. Working with them to identify
the exact coordinates of the villages they’d
abandoned, she travelled there, took a picture of
what remained, and then brought it back to them.
“I followed the map Movses had given to
me,” she says. “I discovered everything he
had described: the sea, the tree with the
17/11/2015 16:34
 30 COOL & NOTEWORTHY
All images from the series 1915 © Diana Markosian fruit he remembered eating, and the goats he
shepherded. I found it all, even the rubble of
what was once his church.”
The stories she was told are traumatic; from
the violence each witnessed as a child, to the
lengths their parents went to get them out safely.
Gevorgyan, now 110, escaped by crossing the river
to what is now present-day Armenia. She watched
as Armenians were killed and thrown into the
water, which she described as “red, full of blood”.
Sahakyan, 101, escaped to Syria with her mother
and older brother, whom they dressed as a girl for
safety. She recalls hiding in the grass and walking
at night for three days to flee the soldiers.
Markosian asked each of them if they had
a wish she could fulfil; Haneshyan, from Musa
Dagh, asked her to find a church and leave his
portrait in what is now a ruin. Gevorgyan asked
her to find her lost brother, though all she had of
him was a crude drawing, his eyes piercing blue.
“He liked to put me on his shoulders and play
with me at the orphanage,” she told Markosian.
“I don’t remember much else about him except he
has blue eyes, like mine.”
Sahakyan asked Markosian to go to her village
and bring back soil for her to be buried in. When
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028-031_01.16_BJP.indd 30
Markosian did so, she opened the package and
said: “You’ve brought the smell of my village to me.”
From these interactions Markosian developed
a body of work combining still-life images with
portraits, landscapes and archival pictures she
discovered with her subjects. It makes for a
multivalent series, in which a cardboard box can
become loaded with significance. Inside one such
box, Markosian discovered, lay the remains of
Armenians from Der Zor, Syria – a destination
to which hundreds of thousands were forced
to march in 1915 and 1916. This location in the
Syrian desert, which is now controlled by Isis, is
synonymous with Auschwitz for many Armenians.
For Markosian, this series is far from over. She’s
using the press interest generated by her work to
support the survivors and, working with Genesis
Imaging, has produced limited edition inkjet prints
sold in aid of the cause. Through her efforts, she’s
raised over $30,000 for three survivors who were
living deep in poverty when she found them.
It is, she says, “a story of home – everything
they had, everything they lost. And what they
have found again.” It’s true for the survivors, and
maybe for herself, too. BJP
www.dianamarkosian.com
17/11/2015 16:34
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