Robert Aghajanyan trained as an apprentice photographer at Aram Aloyan's studio on Abovyan Street in Yerevan in the 1930s. After returning from the Great Patriotic War, he worked at various photo-studios in Yerevan and from 1950s onwards moved into photojournalism becoming a correspondent of Hayastani Gyughatntesutyun [Armenia’s Agriculture] magazine.(1) His photographic reportages and documentary images depicting Armenia's agricultural economy have been published not only in the local press, but also in a number of photo-albums dedicated to Armenia (Soviet Armenia, 1971).

Aghajanyan has a distinct place in the context of Soviet-Armenian documentary photography. Focusing his attention on daily life and culture of Armenian villages, as well as the depiction of collective farms, his photographs are surprisingly devoid of the kind of hyperbolic self-aggrandization of labour that typifies Soviet socialist-realist photography. Instead, the photographer preferred to depict the realities of rural life through gently humanist and sincere optimism. In his black and white, and more rarely, colour photographs the human subject is not seen as a dominant force, but a being that is in harmony with the natural world. Thus, it could be argued that Aghajanyan's direct, almost naive worldview made a significant contribution to the formation of a new brand of social­ly-engaged photography that was more in line with the tenets of post-Stalinist approaches to realist art.

1) For biographical details see Vahan Kochar, Hay Lusankarichner [Armenian Photographers], self-published, 2007, p.72

Vigen Galstyan, 2016