After apprenticing as a teenager with the noted Yerevan-based photographer Torkom Boyajyan in the 1940s, Rafayel Hambardzumyan became one of the youngest professional photojournalists in Soviet Armenia. At the beginning of his career, he worked for a short time at the Yerevan film studio as a cameraman’s assistant, and was employed as a staff photographer at the Yerekoyan Yerevan (Evening Yerevan) daily since 1957. From the 1970s, Hambardzumyan also worked at the Ministry of Culture of the Armenian SSR and the Armenian Central Committee’s Publishing House.(1)

Thanks to his prolific output, a myriad of Hambardzumyan’s photographs were eventually published in almost all the newspapers and magazines in Armenia. His works also graced various photo-albums, guidebooks and other illustrative publications dedicated to Armenia. Often taking part in republican, all-union and international photo competitions, Hambardzumyan was bestowed with a number of significant awards. Particularly successful in this regard is his 1960 photograph After the Surgery (Prof. Ruben Paronyan). After moving to Los Angeles in 1999, the photographer continued to work and actively participate in exhibitions and contests held across the USA.

In the course of his long-enduring photographic practice, Hambardzumyan managed to create thousands of images, the significance and artistic quality of which varies greatly. Shaped and burnished on the methods of socialist-realist and studio photography, his creative outlook was largely determined by the search for ‘sharp’ and catchy motifs and narrative content. It is notable that during the 1960s, Hambardzumyan works clearly displayed a propensity for more relaxed formal solutions and candid style of shooting. He is one of the few Soviet-Armenian photographers who chose to take pictures using flash-lighting, which gave his images a rough and dry texture, but also a hyper-naturalistic edge. Generally, in his best photographs, Hambardzumyan abstained from the maxims of emotional romanticism which characterised the work of so many other of his Soviet-Armenian colleagues. Nevertheless, the content and ideas of these works, regardless of their thematic specificity, are guileless and often trenchant, without any intended subtextual complications.

1) For further biographical details, see the bibliography.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016