Artashes Lalayants’ biographical details are scarce. Surviving photographs suggest that he founded his first studio in Alexandrapol at the beginning of the 1890s, and soon afterwards in Kars and Tiflis. An enterprising practitioner, he was one of the most prolific and popular photographers of that time in the region. The Lalayants studios serviced the middle and upper classes of Kars and Alexandropol. Their portraits today are of great historical and ethnographic interest, as customer often arrived at the studio to document special occasions in their most luxurious and elaborate costumes. Likewise, thanks to Lalayants’ photographs, we are fortunate to have many portraits representing Gyumri’s artists, musicians and other honourable citizens. The photographer also took part in a number of exhibitions, and was awarded a prize by the Russian ‘Photographic Circle’ at the photography exhibition held in Tbilisi and Moscow in 1894.

The most important work by the photographer is, probably, the ‘Album of Scenes from Kars and Kars Province’, published in 1900, in St. Petersburg. This publication in French, Armenian and Russian was printed using the two-tone offset technique and was sold in Tiflis, as well as several other cities of the Russian Empire. It includes a number of exclusive photographs, which represent the lifestyle of Kars’ multi-cultural population, and a selection of its most important Armenian architectural monuments.

As can be seen from photographs dating from the last period of Lalayants’ activity, he ended his career in Tiflis, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. The Alexandrapol-based photographer Senekerim Lalayants was most probably a close relation of Artashes.

(1) This fact is recorded on one of Lalayants’ studio seals.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016