As a photojournalist, B. Gazazyan provided visual materials to ‘Sovetakan Hayastan’ (Soviet Armenia) magazine, as well as a number of Armenian newspapers in the 1950s-60s. His documentary reportages mainly pertain to the development of the light and heavy industry in Armenia and the country’s agriculture. As was typical for the accepted principles of local photojournalism of those years, Gazazyan's ‘documentary’ photographs are choreographed to achieve the desired message and effect. These modest visual episodes represent Armenia as a communist utopia undergoing a rapid economic growth. It is worth notingthat notwithstanding his purely informational and propagandistic directives, a number of Gazazyan’s photographs from the 1960s attempted to use bolder formal solutions that referred to the tenets of modernist and avant-garde photography of the 1920s and 1930s. The photographer’s biographical details have not come to light.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016