Published by powerHouse Books, 2010
Photographs by Ara Oshagan
Texts by Vahé Oshagan
Texts by Vahé Oshagan
Armenian Studies / Photography
Hardcover
12.25 x 10.75 inches
156 pages
75 duotone photographs
Hardcover
12.25 x 10.75 inches
156 pages
75 duotone photographs
$45
Father Land by Vahé and Ara Oshagan is a poetic and personal journey through the rugged, human-and-history-laden landscape of Karabagh. It is also a unique collaboration between a photographer son and his famous, writer father. A family steeped in Armenian literature and art, Vahé and Ara Oshagan’s work is the result of an intensely felt connection to their heritage and homeland. Father Land is a literary and visual contemplation of Karabagh’s present-day, its history, and its culture, as well as a meditation on transnational identity, land, and paternal bonds.
Springing from a deep understanding of the Armenian people and their unique past, Vahé Oshagan’s essay presents a reflective, yet witty and fluid, account of his encounters with people from all walks of Karabagh life. It touches upon topics as diverse as the happenings of the 8th-century BC, the recent war of liberation, the dialect of the people, their worldview, their contradictions, their body language, their spirituality, and their legendary hospitality. It is an accomplished piece of imaginative literature, weaving between literary and literal, creative and factual, objective and subjective reflection.
Ara Oshagan’s photographs provide insight into the lives of the people of Karabagh on a documentary as well as symbolic level and they reflect his personal encounters in the region. At times capturing intimate familial moments; at times in the streets, observing the chaos of life; or, reverent in the presence of Karabagh’s millennial churches, the images in Father
Land simultaneously document, explore, and reflect upon Karabagh’s precarious present and uncertain future.
Taken together, the text and images are symbiotic and deeply connected—like the father and son who produced the work—and they portray a region and a culture as old as the bonds of family and society themselves.