Only two photographs taken by this photographer from Van are known to us. The first of these, a portrait of the young widow, Siranush Mikaelyan, has been published by Vahan Kochar in his biographical dictionary Armenian Photographers.(1) It is a modest and yet, thanks to its contained emotiveness, an extremely touching portrait, which appears as an expressive memento mori in remembrance of a marital life cut short. Another photograph from the collection of the History Museum of Armenia, presents a massive group portrait comprised of hundreds of participants gathered for the Varag monastery feast. Nearly all of the individuals included in this large cabinet photograph would either be expelled from their homeland or die in the course of the 1915 Genocide, a few years later. The image is an evidence of the fact that Khanjian made not only individual portraits, but also recorded various episodes of Van’s civic life. Unfortunately, practically nothing survives of these documentary photographs.

As we learn from the biography of Garegin’s son, Gurgen Khanjian, the photographer belonged to the Dashnak party and managed to escape from Van to Yerevan in 1915, together with his family. After the establishment of Soviet power in Russian Armenia, he was persecuted as an anti-Soviet anarchist. Thanks to his nephew, the first secretary of Communist Party of Armenia, Aghasi Khanjian, Garegin relocated to Tabriz in the early 1920s.(2) Whether Khanjian continued to practice photography after leaving Van from Western Armenia or not, remains to be clarified.

1) Vahan Kochar, Hay Lusankarichner [Armenian Photographers, in Armenian], self-published, Yerevan, 2007, p.48

2) (editorial) ‘Gurgen Khanjian’ [in Armenian], www.asbarez.com, October 7, 2006, http://asbarez.com/arm/42414/գուրգէն-խանճեան/

Vigen Galstyan, 2016