Photographs by the photojournalist and documentary photographer Edmond Simonyan, have appeared on the pages of Soviet Armenian periodicals such as ‘Garun’ (Spring) and ‘Sovetakan Hayastan’ (Soviet Armenia), since the late 1970s. These, mainly observational and sketchy images were influenced by the tradition of European humanist photography and particularly the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. What interested Simonyan was the decoding and revelation of life’s minor and fleeting dramas through the camera. Landscapes and childhood motifs appear with some regularity in his work and just like numerous other Armenian photographers of the 1970s and 1980s, Simonyan has applied solutions and methods drawn from artistic and experimental photography in his documentary photographs, thus rendering his pictures of the everyday with poetic and symbolic connotations. 

Vigen Galstyan, 2018