Kamo Nigaryan is a representative of the so-called ‘dissident’ group of Armenian artists that came to the fore during the 1970s. Graduating from the design faculty of Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts and Theatre, Nigaryan entered the Yerevan branch of the All-Union Scientific-Research Center of Technical Aesthetics in 1975. He left this position in 1981 to become a ‘free artist’, but continuing working as a designer throughout his career. Living and creating on the margins of the Armenia’s art world, Nigaryan was assiduously working on numerous projects, very few of which came to the public’s attention until the early 1990s.

Today, his reputation as one of the most significant contemporary Armenian painters of late 20th and early 21st century is well established. Yet his practice as a photographer remains little known.

Taking up the camera in the mid 1980s, Nigaryan created a suite of portraits and figurative studies that are unique in the annals of Armenian photography. Bringing the same, neo-expressionist approach utilised in his paintings, Nigaryan’s photographs aim to transform the indexical nature of the image. Photographed in dramatic black and white, Nigaryan’s subjects are usually artists and intellectuals from his immediate circle or family members.

Often the negative has been thoroughly reworked by scratching or with the addition of paint, sometimes completely obscuring the faces of those who are being photographed. Thus freed from the burden of being a mere ‘likeness’ or a reflection of reality, Nigaryan’s photographs operate on the level of allegory and existential questioning of self, identity and gender.

By 2005, Nigaryan largely ceased his photographic activity, which was partially due to the unavailability of analogue printing materials. His tightly edited legacy as a photographer comprises only around 200 negatives and some 100 vintage prints. Nevertheless, the remarkable maturity of this work presents a watershed moment in the history of Armenian art photography. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan recognised this significant contribution by organising an exhibition of Nigaryan’s  photographs, which was later presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Perm in 2012.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016