From his first professional steps, Vazgen Ghasabyan appeared as one of the more talented faces of the Soviet-Armenian documentary photography who was bestowed with a highly original worldview. At the beginning of his career, between 1957 and 1962, he worked at the Ministry of Culture of Georgia and corresponded with the newspapers such as Zarya Vostoka and Vecherniy Tbilisi. In 1963, he relocated permanently to Yerevan, working as a correspondent of Kommunist newspaper until 1991 and taking an active part in Yerevan photo-club.(1)

One of the peculiarities of Ghasabyan's photography was its amalgamation of humanism and modernist aesthetics. In his dynamic photographs, he chose to present the physical environment in constant motion, and humans - in the most emotionally tensed-up and expressive state. For this reason, Ghasabyan usually sought to portray actors, artists, musicians and athletes. The photographer's ability to capture the ‘decisive moment’ was widely acknowledged by his contemporaries, and in the opinion of Sovetskoe Foto magazine critics, Ghasabyan was one of the more notable proponents of ‘artistic’ photography in Armenia during the 1960s.(2)

The liberalism typical for 1960s international photography, as well as during the era of Khruschevian ‘Thaw’, is distinctly reflected in Ghasabyan’s bold formal experiments. The deformations generated by movement, sharp angles, fragmentation and piercing tonal transitions gave him the opportunity to convey not only the dynamism of the recorded moment, but also its viscerality. The carefully staged compositional arrangement of the visible world, so inherent to classical  socialist-realist photography is entirely absent here. Instead, Ghasabyan invites viewers to interpret and experience the transient moments documented by his camera, signalling the emergence of new, critical perspectives in Armenian photography.

1) See Vahan Kochar, Hay Lusankarichner [Armenian Photographers, in Armenian], self-published, 2007, p.218
2) 'V Obyektive Armenia' ['Armenia in the Lens', in Russian], Sovetskoe Foto, no.7, 1965, p.6

Vigen Galstyan, 2016