Petros Petrosyan's creative path in photography evolved through rich life experiences. He has used the camerafrom his teenageyears and was able to refine his skills by apprenticing with one of the best documentary photographers in Armenia, Hakob Hekekyan. For fifteen years, from 1963 to 1979, heserved as a correspondent of the Sovetakan Hayastan (Soviet Armenia) magazine, becoming a member of the USSR Journalists’ Union in 1967. His career took a different turn in 1979, when Petrosyan was appointed as staff photographer at the Cultural Relations Committee with the Diaspora (known as AOKS), where he worked alongside another noted photo master of the period, Gagik Harutyunyan. FollowingArmenia's independence Petrosyan became the official photographer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1993 and also taught photography at Yerevan State University's Journalism Faculty for a number of years.(1)

Petrosyan's practice in the area of documentary photography passed throughmany stages, which reflect the overall development of popularphotography duringthe second half of the 20th century. Adhering to the tenets of socialist-realist propaganda at the beginning of his career inthe 1950s, Petrosyan quickly turned to the winds of ‘free’, experimental photography in the 1960s. However, since the early 1970s, his photographs were gradually dominated by journalistic functionalism with a pedantic focus on the documentary inscription of facts – a tendency that became particularly pronounced after Petrosyan turned to colour photography.

It should be said that in general, Petrosyan tried to avoid patently dry, indifferent recordingof events byskillfully incorporating narrative, compositional or purely emotive elements into his photographs, in order to make the image more appealing.  However, the pictured event or subject in these works intended for the press, remained attached to empiric faculties and was devoid of conceptual or critical layering.

1) For biographical details see Vahan Kochar, Hay Lusankarichner [Armenian Photographers, in Armenian], self-published, Yerevan, 2007, p.282

Vigen Galstyan, 2016