Ashot Muradyan started his photographic practice in the mid 1980s. For a short period of time, he worked at the ‘Yerevan’ television studio and graduated from the photo-cinema department of Yerevan Pedagogical Institute. During the 1990s, Muradyan taught photography at the Republican Center of Aesthetic Education later founding the ‘Collage’ publishing house.(1) From the 1980s onwards, Muradyan has corresponded with various periodicals and newspapers in Armenia. Judging from some of his published images, the photographer preferred the more experimental possibilities of ‘artistic’ photography and tended to aestheticize even his reportage work. The more ‘staged’ of his images are typified by heavy-handed symbolism and the propensity for striking visual effects.

Of his documentary work, the series representing the first years of independent Armenia in the early 1990s, as well as the war in Karabagh, are particularly memorable. This collection was published in 2016 in the photobook Road to Victory.

1) Vahan Kochar, Hay Lusankarichner [Armenian Photographers, in Armenian], self-published, Yerevan, 2007, p.255

Vigen Galstyan, 2016