Around Borders

AROUND BORDERS
By Max Houghton/Foto

photography/6787786/Around-Borders.html
12:04PM GMT 11 Dec 2009

Karen Mirzoyan’s interpretation of the chaos and confusion circling
the Turkey-Armenia border.

If the Turkey-Armenia border reopens, as per the protocols signed at a
ceremony in Switzerland by the foreign ministers of the two countries
on 10 October 2009, it will mark an end to a 16-year blockade of
Armenia by Turkey.

Turkey closed the frontier in 1993, to show solidarity towards its
ally Azerbaijan, engaged at the time in a war with Armenia over the
territory of Nagorno Karabak. Yet hostilities between Turkey and
Armenia have a far longer and bloodier history.

Karen Mirzoyan, an ethic Armenian born in Tbilsi, Georgia, currently
lives in Armenia. His disorienting pictures, taken from both sides
of the 325 km border, offer an interpretation of the chaos and
confusion that circles the lives of those that live in the region’s
small villages. "It feels like a vicious circle with everything
chaotically moving around inside it, a road that has no beginning or
end, no simple way of going from A to B physically and figuratively."

This is an excerpt from an article published in the latest issue of
Foto8 magazine, Control. Telephoto readers can subscribe to Foto8
at a discount of 40% off 1 and 2 year subs, plus a free copy of the
latest issue. Please quote the code ‘Telephoto’.

You can here Karen talking about this series at the recent Photoquai
in Paris on Foto8’s You Tube channel.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/