Very little is known about Vagharshak Hakobyan’s background. The photographer's studio was on the central Mikhailovsky (now David Agmashenabili) Avenue in Tiflis. Judging from the earliest of Hakobyan’s portraits, it was probably estbalished in the late 1900s. On his seal, Hakobyan presented himself as an ‘artistic’ photographer – a standard moniker used by turn of the century local photographers to lure customers wanting more extravagant representations of themselves. To date, all of his known images are portraits. They are mostly photographs of members of Tiflis’s bourgeoisie and cosmopolitan intellectuals. In them, Hakobyan sought to underline the social standing and affluent background of his clients, but rarely reached true artistic expressivity. The fate of the photographer’s studio after the establishment of Soviet rule in Georgia is not known.

Vigen Galstyan, 2017