A retrospective photo exhibition titled "Black Life" by award-winning Armenian photojournalist and documentary photographer Ruben Mangasaryan (1963-2009) opened at the Art Gallery on the evening of Sept. 16 in Yerevan, Armenia.
Mangasaryan shot the story "Black Life," which won several awards and was published in Days of Japan magazine and BCC Online, from 2003 to 2009. The project documents the life of an Armenian family that fled the war over Nagorno Karabakh for the village of Bagratashan.
The Gadyans' Black Life is about extreme poverty, trauma and squalor. The family stove, fueled chiefly by plastic, has a leaking stovepipe that lets heavy smoke into the home, coating everything and everyone with soot.
Lida Gadyan, 45, is a refugee from Baku, Azerbaijan where she washed dishes in a canteen. In the 1990s, Lida fled to Bagratashen with her son and mother; her husband left her. In her first decade in Armenia, Lida worked as a prostitute, giving birth to seven children in the process. She left two of them at the hospital, another was stillborn and yet another died of hunger at five months.
Mangasaryan, who was teaching photography at the Caucasus Institute, was one of the most well-known and respected photojournalists in Armenia. He created Patker Photo Agency and his work has been seen at the annual prestigious Visa Pour l'Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France. Mangasaryan died suddenly on March 21, 2009.
"Black Life" will run until Sept. 30.
Anahit Hayrapetyan is a freelance photojournalist based in Yerevan.
A young girl plays with her sister in Shavshvebi, one tof the newly constructed settlements in Georgia for internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Souh Ossetia. Most IDPs living in the settlement are from Eredvi, a Georgian village located within the South Ossetia administrative border. During the conflict in August 2008 ethnic Georgians fled and most houses were burned.
EurasiaNet contributing photojournalist and documentary photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz will have an exhibition of her recent work from the south Caucasus at the Visa Pour l'Image photojournalism festival in the southern French town of Perpignan. Her recent project, "Shared Sorrows, Divide Lines," will open at the Couvent des Minimes exhibition hall during Pro Week on Aug. 28 and continue during the four weeks of the event. All exhibitions during Visa Pour l'Image are open to the public for free.
Mielnikiewicz won the Canon Female Photojournalist Award 2009 for her long term documentary work on Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the breakaway regions in the South Caucasus. Originally from Poland, Mielnikiewicz moved to Tbilisi in 2002 to work as a freelancer after working as staff photojournalist for Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. In addition to her work being posted on EurasiaNet, she has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek Poland, Monocle, Russian Reporter, Ogoniok, NG Travel, Le Monde and many more newspapers and magazines. In 2009 she won second prize in the "People in the News" category for the World Press Photo Awards.
