A conversation between Ara Oshagan and Esther Fan
ARA OSHAGAN is an Armenian, Lebanese, and American lens-based artist. His key explorations are the afterlives of Armenian displacement and diasporic presence. In our conversation, he tells me, “I think about homeland, a right of return in a place I imagine. What is land? How are you connected to land? That’s a big question for me.”
Ara Oshagan, Beirut Memory Project #49, 2018-2021, Digital collage, archival pigment print on velvet fine art paper.
Ara: Displacement will fracture the relationship you have with land as well as with history. It’s a fracturing of presence, relationships to place and home, relationships to narrative. It all kind of becomes fractured when you're diasporic. Not just physical, but all these other things get displaced.
Much of the collage work I do tries to address this displacement and fracturing. As you know, a lot of my work began with documentary photography, but it's evolved into collage work. There is fracturing here, and in the films I make.
Esther: Do you, or how do you think using your craft to fracture and also unite the image helps you make sense of diasporic presence?
Ara: The process of creating my artwork creates a new relationship for me to whatever I'm working with, such as displacement, or my own history. If I could write it down, articulate it, then I probably wouldn’t make the artwork.
For instance, I'm thinking about what you said earlier, how fractured things come together. In this one scroll work I have, I fractured my photographs, taking pieces from photographs I had taken in one region in Armenia where all the inhabitants were recently displaced from their land.
So I destroyed these photographs, in a way. I broke them apart to pieces, fracturing them, but then I brought them back all together in scroll form in a panoramic space. I reimagined creating this kind of conceptual community from these fractured pieces.
This new community takes pieces from all over—many different places and timeframes—and brings them all together into one space, while a single photograph is specific to a place and time. Breaking up photographs and bringing them together crosses physical and time boundaries in scroll form. It's centripetal and centrifugal at the same time.
The background of this particular work are pages from my grandfather's notebooks. My grandfather was a writer. He was also displaced by the Armenian Genocide two generations ago. So this work connects today's displacement with that displacement from 100 years ago. It, in particular, reminded me of how things are broken apart and brought back together.
Fracturing is inherent in the collage. It is inherent in the films that I make as they are three channel or two channel—multiple images moving in unison and dissonance. And in the Beirut Memory series, I take photos from today and before displacement and bring them in proximity, embedding the old photo in the new photo.
I use family photos a lot. My relationship to displacement is embedded in these photos. Family photos from Beirut, for instance, are really important and resonant for me, because they speak about that displacement. I hardly use any vernacular photos after displacement in my work. It’s all before.
Ara Oshagan, Riders of the Hye Riders
Motorcycle Club, Glendale,
2004, 2000-2010, Archival pigment print on mat paper.
Motorcycle Club, Glendale,
2004, 2000-2010, Archival pigment print on mat paper.
Esther: How does it make you feel, the fact that you only use photos from before displacement?
Ara: I'm not a very nostalgic person, and not very sentimental in that way. So when I look at those images, I'm connected to them emotionally, obviously, because they’re of my family. They are relics of the past that I tried to connect to. And I posit a kind of bridging across the displacement when I use photos from before and from after.
What do you have from previous displacement? What do you have if you’re displaced? What are the things that are left over from displacement?
Your memories? Maybe you brought some objects and things over. We didn't bring any, hardly, I mean we have some rugs and things… I should do something with those rugs. But really, it's just these photographs that you have, or maybe texts your father may have written—my father wrote poetry—which you have a relationship to. So it's one of the few things that allows you to look back and try to create a relationship to things that happened before your displacement.
Ara Oshagan, That You May Return #3 [Oshagan Family Series], 2023, Digital collage, print on fabric.
Esther: We talk about affect in anthropology as something that’s shared, felt, yet indescribable almost. Emotions are us categorizing aspects of affect. And in your relationship with old photos and with displacement, there’s an affectual component. Emotion isn't the right word, but there's some kind of sentiment attached to it. But it's indescribable. So it’s better expressed.
Ara: It’s indescribable. The only thing you can do as an artist is work with that material and incorporate it in your work, then try and relate this indescribable kind of state to a larger audience to try to create this collective community. A lot of the photos I use in my work involve other people. So these archival, vernacular photos also demonstrate the personal and collective being connected here in a deep way, which is a part of my work.
Esther: Yeah, and when these photos go into these archives, the way people interact with traces of displacement or presence, is interesting in itself. There's these grand narratives, for example, Brooklyn is being gentrified or displacement in Armenia. Then, there are hidden, personal narratives, of how someone who has experienced displacement across generations looks at this photo and how they feel. It’s almost like your own lived experience of and nostalgia for history. The craziest part is that you can have nostalgia when looking at a photo of a time or place you've never even lived in, through, or experienced. It’s like communal nostalgia.
Ara: I mean, I think we’re saying the same thing. There's a grand narrative to it, a collective, communal narrative, and then there's a personal relationship to these things.
Esther: For sure. I was also wondering, how do you pick the spaces where you take your photographs? And how do you know when to take a photograph?
Ara: So there's a few layers to that. For instance, I select that region where I'm going to work, a site, let’s say. In the Beirut work, it was mostly this five block area in Beirut, but also a couple of other places, as well as where I grew up in Beirut, which is a little bit further off from there.
I want to, through photographs, articulate some relationship to this place. It is very important that I was born there, and it's got this history of communities settling there after displacement from genocide. My community. Then I have my own history of displacement from there and retuning— I bring this baggage, this history back to that space. There's all these things, layered and stratified, that are very resonant and important for me there. So that's where I photograph.
When I am in that space, it's very much a running into whatever you run into, and speaking with people and moving around. There's a lot of movement and always exploring everything. Usually what ends up happening is I explore the whole area, but I end up in one even smaller place than the small place. And I kind of hang out there for a long time.
The process of making the camera invisible, like we were talking about earlier, is to spend a lot of time in one place where people kind of get used to it. “Yeah, okay, you know, there’s Ara and his camera. Whatever, okay.” At some point, they'll say, “Aren’t you done taking pictures?” I’ll say something like “I need more pictures.” And then, at some point, they start ignoring the camera. It becomes somebody smoking, whatever, and the process is ignored. So you need to get to that point in your interaction, in your presence in that space. That makes for particular types of photos.
But then at the moment of photography, or in those moments, it's very instinctual. I hang out in places where I think I can make photographs that speak to what I'm trying to articulate.
I never know whether the photographs are gonna work out or not. I’ll bring my camera up, take a picture, and go, “Oh, my God, this is the best picture ever taken.” And then I look at it later and it's, “Holy crap, this is really bad.” Or, I would quickly take a picture, and not really even remember taking it, because I was so immersed in that moment in time. And then I would look at it and it’d be a really good picture.
Ara Oshagan, Bourj Hammoud Armenian Cemetery, Beirut, 2014, 2014-2018, Archival pigment print on mat paper.
Esther: You’re basically an anthropologist. Like you're doing what we do, except for with a camera. When you talk about making the camera invisible, I think about how long it takes for the notebook to become invisible, or how basically the way we do research is deep hanging out.
Ara: Yeah, because you need to hang out, you need to spend that time so that they become comfortable with you and they open up to you and tell you their story about their life. That's what you do. With photographs, it’s the same process, to be able to take photos that reflect this state of presence where you articulate what makes sense to you, then it takes time to get there, right?
Esther: I'm thinking now about Claude Lévi-Strauss’ idea of bricolage, assembling with the pieces you have at hand given particular life constraints. As well as Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, that talks about how as humans we pattern assemblages that are constantly changing, with human and nonhuman actors. If diasporic presence was an assemblage you were trying to make sense of, the photos, and memories become actors. They become alive. Different people you talk to that give you recollections and stories also become actors in helping you assemble your idea of diasporic presence.
Ara: Yeah, a hundred percent! I was just talking about that. The photos I take completely change my view of the place, like my relationship to the place. The photos become actors in defining this relationship, and the process of photographing becomes part of that. And for people who see the work, the photographs, it changes their view of the place. These works become actors in their memories. This reminds me of something I was talking about the other day, What are the audiences of the work? Somebody asked me that.
A very important audience, first of all, is the people that you photograph. What is really important is when they see your photographs of them, their community, it shifts their own perspectives about themselves. You don’t regurgitate what they know in terms of how they see themselves. They look at the photos and go “Wow this is us. This is a very particular view on us.” I think it’s really important to not only create a shift in the perspective of those outside that community, but also for those within the community when they interact with these photos.
Esther: I had a professor who taught on Politics of China, and he decided to go to the middle of China and photograph this tiny town. Not long after there was a natural disaster that wiped out the entire town. He was invited, years later, to the same town to show these photographs and commemorate what happened. There was this man who was crying in front a photo of two young boys, and he said, “My brother passed away that day. That's the last photo I have with him.” The person being photographed is not only an actor through being in the photo, but their own remembrance of the event also becomes part of this assemblage of presence.
Ara: Yeah definitely. Wow, that’s a very powerful example of that. There's really an important process to make visible, to reverse erasure in my work, especially in the kind of diaspora where displacement from indigenous lands and the attempt by other actors to erase your culture, language, presence in the world, which is happening to the Armenians and other people, Palestinians for instance. So photography is really important here. Documentation is where you start. It is about leaving traces, so that even when a place is erased, the photos remain, giving that place visibility.
My work goes against this erasure to say, “No. We’re here, this is here. This exists, we’re visible. We’re not erased, we will not be erased.”