One of the more exciting names to have emerged in Armenian photography in the last decade, Karen Mirzoyan has developed a truly international career within a short period of time.

As a photojournalist, documentarian and visual artist, Mirzoyan’s work has been widely published in major periodicals in Armenia, Russia, Europe and the USA. In 2010 Mirzoyan won three major awards from the Magnum Foundation: the ‘Emergency’ grant, the Magnum Caucasus Award and full scholarship for the New York University/ Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights Program. Since 2010, Mirzoyan has also been guest-lecturing on documentary photography in American and Russian universities.  

At once visceral and poetic, Mirzoyan’s extensive photo-stories document ongoing political conflicts and social problems in the Caucasus, Middle East, Eastern Europe, ex-USSR republics and the USA. The photographer has a continuing interest in people on the margins of society and his work has done much to spread light on the lives of suicide survivors, homosexuals and war victims in territories across the ex-USSR.

In recent years Mirzoyan has increasingly shifted his focus towards art photography. His experiments in this field aim to expand and comment upon the formal and aesthetic structures of the medium.

Mirzoyan’s work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions since the mid 2000s. In 2014 he established Mirzoyan Library - the first dedicated space to photography in Armenia.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016