Biographical details regarding Photo Sarkis’s proprietor have not been found. He is the only Armenian photographer known to us who worked in the historic Egyptian city of Asiut. The studio’s surviving photographs bear the distinct influence of commercial art deco photography of the 1930s-40s. Striving for glamorous effects, one of the features of these photographs is the ‘veiling’ of subjects and the surrounding décor in soft, smoky lighting.

Vigen Galstyan, 2017