Born in the village of Khtsaberb Artsakh, Anahit Hayarapetyan made a radical career change after studying information technologies for nine years. She completed a course on photo-reportage at the World Press Photo photo-documentary department of Caucasian Institute and later continued her education in Denmark. Her mentor in 2005-2006 was the noted master of documentary photography Ruben Mangasaryan.

Hayrapetyan’s photo-essays began to appear on the pages of local and regional press from the very beginning of her career. She is also an active participant of exhibitions and competitions where she has won of a number of major awards. Hayrapetyan regularly writes poetry and has published two book compilations of her literary output. Currently she works as a freelance documentary photographer, dividing her time between Yerevan, Frankfurth and Khtsaberd.

What typifies Hayrapetyan’s approach is the combination of brutal observation of reality and a similarly hard-edged poetic sensibility. Her favourite subjects are usually people and places that live on the peripheries of global culture or are victims of social injustice. Working in serial format, Hayrapetyan assembles a group of ten to thirty images, that convey an emotional and visceral sense of place and environment. Like the photographic series of Letizia Battaglia and Ruben Mangasaryan, Harutyunyan’s works aim to capture the emotional core of her subjects by distilling the context down to one crucial element. Extraneous details are eliminated through the strategic use of natural light sources. Reminiscent of baroque painting, darkness is a key device in her work. It suggests a purely imaginative space, through which the documentary content of her images acquires a novelistic dimension.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016