Nazik Armenakyan is an award-winning photographer and one of the most highly regarded photojournalists working in Armenia today. She studied photography in Armenia, under Ruben Mangasaryan at the Caucasus Media Institute, Yerevan (2005) and has also completed a Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights Program fellowship at the New York University in 2011. Until its closure in 2016, Armenakyan worked as the staff photographer at the Armenia Now news agency in Yerevan. In 2013, she co-founded the ‘4 Plus’ documentary photography center along with her colleagues Anahit Hayrapetyan and Anush Babajanyan.

Since the beginning of her career, Armenakyan has focused her attention on individuals and social groups living on the margins of Armenian society. Frequently, the photographer has delved into topics that are shrouded by silence and hostility. As a result, Armenakyan has made a considerable effort to raise awareness and dialogue about minority groups living in Armenia, the LGBT community, HIV victims and Genocide survivors.

In 2010, she began to photograph members of Yerevan’s closed transgender community, many of whom earn their living through prostitution. This controversial project aimed to bring the personal and human side of story behind these individuals to the forefront of public attention. Armenakyan’s extensive documentation of this subculture was turned into a book, which was featured in a number of international exhibitions, after raising waves of controversy in Armenia.

Oscillating between photo-reportage and documentary essays, Armenakyan’s direct, unadorned style of photography viscerally captures her subjects in their environment. The final photo-essays she assembles are a result of in-depth research and communication, which often evolves over lengthy periods of time and requires the photographer’s personal and close involvement with her subjects. Echoing the work of Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, Armenakyan’s photographs often edge uncomfortably close to the borders of political correctness, morality and ethics in order to draw the viewer into an intense and provocative dialogue about the political dimension of photographic images.

More recently, Armenakyan’s practice has taken on a more premeditated aura. Successfully combining her signature grittiness and documentary directness with simple but powerful conceptual frameworks, Armenakyan’s more mature work is unquestionably among the more edgier and socially conscious political art to come out of Armenia in the last decade.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016