ianyan magazine
March 26 2010

How We Live: Exhibit Highlights Growing Poverty in Armenia

By Liana Aghajanian on March 26th, 2010

Grigor, a 29-year-old husband and father who lives on the outskirts of
Etchmiadzin in Armenia gets up for work at 6 a.m and doesn’t leave
until 5. Unlike most of the typical workforce however, Grigor’s day is
spent rummaging through a garbage dump, where he searches for odds and
ends like plastic to sell and shoes to burn for fuel. When he’s able
to sell what he finds, his family has food on the table.

Unfortunately, Grigor’s dire situation is not too uncommon – after
reducing poverty rates by half in the last decade, Armenia has seen a
sharp rise again, according to the World Bank.

Armed with a camera and the support of the Tufenkian Foundation,
photographer Sara Anjargolian set out to document and raise awareness
of the rising poverty level, the results of which have been culminated
into an exhibition and book.

`How We Live: An exhibit and book documenting life on the margins in
Armenia,’ will debut in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 27 with over 40
large prints suspended by wires, along with multimedia projection
screens that will aim to unite the viewer and the subject in the same
space, in an effort to blur the lines between `us’ and `them.’

`Photography in Armenia is in some ways more familiar to me than
living in L.A., it’s kind of like my own backyard,’ Anjargolian said.

Anjargolian, who is also an attorney and served as a trial lawyer in
the Justice Department in Washington D.C., went to Armenian on a
10-month Fulbright scholarship but ended up staying for two and a half
years between 2002 and 2004.

Although she had seen poverty first hand in Armenia before, the time
she spent photographing families for the exhibition had a profound
effect on her. Her objective was to represent each story as truthfully
as she could, without making her subjects feel objectified or taken
advantage of, she said.

`A lot of the details that these families shared with me are things
that they’re not proud of – and things that their natural tendency
would be to hide,’ she said. `Just gaining their trust and making it
more of a collaboration than someone just showing up shooting film and
leaving, that was kind of the biggest challenge for me.’

However, the fact that she was accustomed to Armenia and quite the
opposite – that she was essentially from the outside and not from
their own backyard made her subjects feel comfortable.

`I tried to show them as much respect as I could, I didn’t push,’
Anjargolian said.

She called watching Grikor, the young man who supports his entire
family by selling items he finds at the garbage dump, an intense
experience.

`It was very difficult to see somebody who was a young able bodied,
smart young man to do that every day,’ she said. `What was even more
striking was that he had made peace with it. I was almost paralyzed a
little bit of the gravity and heaviness of the situation. It left a
lasting impression on me.’

Although Armenia had been making significant strides towards the
reduction of poverty, having had the poverty percentage drop from over
55 percent in the late 90s to 25 percent in 2008, global demand,
international prices for key exports and an unprecedented drop in
remittances from Armenians overseas have recently deeply affected the
country, according to a report published by the World Bank’s
International Development Association.

`A lot of these families had family working abroad sending money and
their main source of income from abroad ended,’ Anjargolian said.

While many Diaspora Armenians travel to Armenia, the images in
Anjargolian’s photography isn’t something that’s usually seen.

`I think Diaspora Armenians who travel to there don’t see this side of
Armenia,’ she said. `They go as a tourist, they see all the beautiful
churches and Yerevan – all of that is really great, but I think the
lifestyle that I’ve photographed is very much on the margins of
Armenia.’

Anjargolian contends that the the fringes of Armenian society deserve
as much attention as anything else.

`I think it’s really important for the diaspora to know about this.
First it’s awareness, but I’m hoping that besides the awareness,
there’s dialogue about the situation and a questioning of `how is
this possible?’

`I just want to move people to know what’s going on in our country and
hopefully move them to act on it.’

The exhibit also contains a lot of photographs of single Armenian
mothers – one of the most haunted stories coming from a 40-year-old
woman named Narineh Simonian.

Simonian lived with her four children in Arinch, a town located just
outside of Yerevan. She was married to an abusive alcoholic who raped
her and beat her throughout their marriage and threatened her and her
children’s lives, according to Anjargolian. With a help of local
non-profit, she was able to obtain a legal divorce and move with her
children to a dilapidated house owned by her brother. She tries to
make a living by buying and selling vegetables.

`Poverty has a disproportionate affect on women who are alone in
Armenia,’ Anjargolian said. `In Armenia, there’s still an old school
traditional perspective about women who are no longer married or
divorced, kind of like, they’re sort of done with, or nobody is going
to want to marry them.’

According to Anjargolian, Simonian is moving back with her parents, a
move that took a lot of work because she didn’t want to bring shame on
her parents.

`I had much more open, straight forward conversations with the women,
that in some ways made the pictures better, we had a mutual trust.’

Anjargolian has also seen the struggle of women in Armenia to carry
their traditional roles while transitioning into careers,
entrepreneurship and the work force.

`Women have been able to move with the times, life in Armenia for
women is definitely harder.’

Anjargolian’s hope is to take the exhibition to the east coast of the
United States and Armenia.

WHAT: How We Live, photographed by Sara Anjargolian; Curated by
Narineh Mirzaeian and produced in Collaboration with the Tufenkian
Foundation

WHERE: Casitas Studios. 3229 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles, 90039

WHEN: Saturday, March 27, 2010, 7 p.m.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress