Studio ‘Nadir’ had a long history. Its founder, Garabed Pabutchian opened the doors of his first establishment at the beginning of the 1890s, on the Grand Rue in Constantinople’s Armenian-populated Pera district. Pabutchian was a wily operator as can be assumed from the logo and name of his studio, which are quite blatantly meant to resemble Nadar. According to Bahattin Öztuncay, the studio was often advertised through false claims of numerous overblown achievements.

At a certain point in his career, possibly after the 1915 Armenian Genocide, Pabutchyan emigrated to Egypt, where he re-opened his studio in Alexandria. It was, judging from the scale of its production, quite a successful business. Entirely made up of carte de visite, cabinet and carte-postale portraits, Nadir’s output is characterized by soft lighting, sepia-toned textures and frequent vignetting effects, which give his photographs a fashionably elegant sheen. They are obvious precursors of the latter ‘glamour’ photography in which most Egyptian-Armenian photographers specialized between the late 1930s and early 1950s. ‘Nadir’ existed at least until the mid 1930s.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016