Valery and David Rostomyans were two of the more famous Baku photographers at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Unlike his brother who mingled with the city’s nobility and the upper classes, Valery Rostomyan's photographic venture was a more modest establishment as can be seen from surviving photographs and the social status of his customers. According to some sources, Valery opened his pavilion in 1888, at Gajibekov's commercial house on Krivaya Street.(1) David Rostomyan would open his own studio soon after, in a location very near to his brother’s premises.

The photographer's clients were the multi-ethnic families of workers and labourers as well as the small merchants who had been coming to Baku in their thousands during the city’s oil boom. Rostomyan's conventional and simplistic portraits give us a general idea about ​​the overall living and social standards of Baku’s multi-layered population and are extremely interesting from an historical-archival perspective.

1) https://www.ourbaku.com/index.php/Фотоателье_%22Фотография_В.Ростомяна%22, (accessed 20.10.2017)

Vigen Galstyan, 2016