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Past event recordings
Conversations on Photography
Thursday, Sep 26, 2024
Event description: French-Armenian photojournalist Astrig Agopian discusses ‘Like There’s No Tomorrow’, her multimedia/photography project about the life of Nagorno-Karabakh youth dealing with uncertainty and the constant shadow of war. It is supported by the Art WorksProjects Emerging Lens Fellowship.
Saturday, April 9, 2022
Event description: The next speaker in Project SAVE’s new series, Conversations on Photography, is Nazik Armenakyan, one of the leading documentary photographers in Armenia and co-founder of the 4Plus Collective; a non-profit organization that aims to develop documentary photography in that region. Her talk will explore the ways in which photography has impacted her life for over a decade. She’ll also discuss the current status and potential of photography in Armenia.
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
Event description: Photographer and artist Pavel Romaniko has spent the past few months exploring Project Save’s vast collection of original photographs, primarily focusing on an extensive collection of photos from Armenia during the late 1980s-early 1990s and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. Romaniko will discuss these photographs and his work as a photographer and artist who left the USSR when he was a teenager.
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
Event description: Under Stalin’s Sun is a rare first-hand account by one of the rare survivors of the gulag, Suren Oganessian. A native of Meghri, Armenia, Oganessian’s intense experience, escape, and harrowing journey from the Russian hinterlands, through Europe and to Chicago is a unique and symbolic story of survival, resilience, and cultural rebirth. Ogannesian’s memoir was retranslated and republished by Raffi Meneshian, who is the founder of Pomegranate Music, an educator, and publisher.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
Event description: Rebecca Topakian’s photographs explore questions of identity between the self, collective history, mythology and experience. By disrupting the rules of documentary and fiction, Topakian’s photographs ask, How can we approach documentary photography so that it holds space for including the viewer’s imagination and participation? And what are the implications?
April 4, 2023
Photography in Harput (a historically Armenian area now in Turkey) always had a special role as a means of communicating with a distant ‘elsewhere’. Above all, a link was forged with the northeastern US, a notable place of origin for American missionaries and destination point for Armenian migrants. Dr. Low’s talk will explore long distance photographic dialogues and consider how pictures worked to solidify relationships and sustain communities during a period of great change.
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
Event description: The invention of photography in the 19th century helped launch the intense boom of modernity. Today, photography is such a core part of our everyday lives that we often take it for granted. In this talk, Elena Bulat, Photograph Conservator at Harvard University, will discuss the origins and continuing impact of this world-changing invention.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Event description: Photographer and architect Norair Chahinian opens our Fall installments of “Conversations on Photography”. He has worked on various photographic projects in Armenia, the Middle East, and Turkey, as well as in his native Brazil. His photo book, “The Power of Emptiness: Talking with Stones in Historical Armenia”, was published in 2015.
Thursday, June 16, 2022
Event description: Whitinsville, Massachusetts is a historical and storied part of the Armenian diasporan experience. In this presentation, Lisa Misakian and Gregory Jundanian will share their recent work to document the vibrant Armenian-American community of Whitinsville, which in many ways has much in common with other North American communities where Armenians found and redefined themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries. Find the Armenians of Whitinsville here: https://armeniansofwhitinsville.org/
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
Event description: Tatiana Cole is the Paper and Photograph Conservator at the Boston Athenaeum. She is also a member of Project SAVE’s new Advisory Board. Cole’s talk, titled “The Stories Photographs Tell” will discuss the material nature of the photograph, and the value that photographs and archives bring to our lives.