During the 1980s, Tigran Pashayan’s photographs appeared with some frequency in the journal Garun. Along with his more standard portraiture and street photography, Pashayan produced a series of more expressionistic images depicting Yerevan’s urban environment. Emphasizing the spatial relationship between architectural volumes and elaborately played with light and shadow to produce an atmosphere charged with inner drama. By amplifying these sharp contrasts, Pashayan aimed to reflect the sense of alienation and melancholia that permeated the late modernist era in Soviet culture. In his best works, which recall the analytical modality of American ‘topographical’ photography of the 1970s, the relationship between the individual subject and society is ambivalent and pregnant with tension. As yet, no precise information about the photographer’s biography has been discovered.

Vigen Galstyan, 2017