READING ‘FATHER LAND’
BY TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN
asbarez
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
The cover of “Father-Land”
“Father Land” Exhibition and Book Signing at the Glendale Public Library
Friday June 3, 2011, from 7 – 10 pm
Exhibition runs from June 1 to July 30, 2011.
Artist talk will be on Friday June 10, 2011, 4 pm.
Glendale Public Library
222 East Harvard Street
Glendale, CA 91205
(818) 548-2042
Ara Oshagan is a documentary photographer. He is also my cousin. His
father, Vahe Oshagan, and my mother, Anahid Oshagan Voskeritchian, are
brother and sister. I must mention our familial tie in the spirit of
full disclosure as I am about to sit with his recently published book
of photographs, Father Land (powerHouse Books, NY), to write. But rest
assured: If there is the appearance of a conflict of interest here, it
is a ruse. True, we are related to each other by blood and friendship
and common interests, but we are (and have been for some years now)
each other’s interrogators; at times, each other’s corrective lens; at
times, each other’s critic. In addition to breaking bread at the same
table many times, we have thought together mostly in Western Armenian,
our ancestral language, but also, of late, our “language of return.”
And almost always, we have been each other’s mirror of refraction and
congruence, agreement and divergence. Ara Oshagan’s Afterword to the
book follows this post.
Father Land is a consciously complicated book. Here the photographer
son and the writer father cohabit and claim not only the space
of the book but also the attention of the reader. In addition to
this generational cohabitation (and competition), there is also a
cohabitation of languages, the original Armenian of the father’s
long essay on Karabakh and the English language translation by
G.M.Goshgarian (who is also the translator of record of Hagop Oshagan’s
Mnatsortats), followed by the seventy or so black-and-white photographs
whose sequencing as well as the placement of each photograph on the
page often take the breath away, so well thought out are the design
and narrative choices here.
Oshagan’s short Afterword in English and Armenian translation brings
the book to a close, but nothing is concluded despite the absolutes
which surround Karabakh in the national consciousness of Armenians
the world over. In fact, this inconclusiveness is directly related to
the tension between the text and the images, neither one illustrative
of the other, neither one subservient to the other. If Karabakh’s
recent history is a struggle for national liberation, which it is,
then this book is also a declaration of artistic and generational
autonomy, an autonomy which is nevertheless sustained by the common
theme of the journey the father and son make to Karabakh.
There are other complications as well. The Afterword’s final sentence
opens onto a new space, a new territory, as though the book were
the prologue to something which is yet to come or something of huge
import left intentionally unsaid or left to the reader’s literary and
visual perceptions. And the Afterword’s last words are echoed in the
opening paragraphs of the father’s essay with which the book begins,
forming another loop, another return, if you will, to a beginning. A
journey of discovery, yes, but also of return; a book of narrative,
yes, but also of cyclical time.
Father Land is Vahe Oshagan’s last completed prose work, and more
significantly the only prose work (as far as I know) which he wrote
about a specific locale. His poetry, on the other hand, is very much
anchored in urban settings. In fact, one of his most powerful poems,
“Beirut-Paris” is a counterpunctal drawing of an imaginary line
between Beirut and Paris, a line which does not go through Yerevan,
as the poet himself says in the poem. In this respect, Father Land
is a kind of anomaly in the prolific output of Vahe Oshagan, perhaps
fueled by his accentuated sense of mutability, or perhaps by the
congruence between prose and the idea of a journey.
And why Karabakh in specific, and not the Republic of Armenia? And
why Karabakh as the subject of a testament from a writer whose entire
literary and public life was sustained by the idea of dispersion and
absence, or at least illusiveness, of The Home? Why not a prose work
about journeying to the Armenian ghetto of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut,
for instance, instead of Karabakh?
Some of the answers to these questions can be found in the father’s
narrative, which is at once a short history of Karabakh, an evocation
of its landscape, an extended hymn the heroism of the Karabakh
Armenians in battle and everyday life, and a travelogue of a place
whose merciless remoteness is equal to its hold on the imagination.
Everything matters here, and matters deeply-from history, to landscape,
to legend, to literature, to military victories and quotidian triumphs
of will and tenacity, to larger-than-life common folk whose mission
seems to be resistance to the poundings of life and artillery of
hostile neighbors across the border. As I sit with this book, I am
reminded of a comment which Marc Nichanian once made in passing, when
we were talking about photographing the diaspora. “The diaspora is
invisible,” he said. “How to make it visible? That’s the problem.” In
contrast, everything in Karabakh is visible and “known.”
The question for the photographer, then, is perhaps a reversal of
Nichanian’s question: How to make Karabakh invisible, or half visible.
This, I think, is the unspoken intent of Ara Oshagan, his craft’s
declaration of independence from the text.
And here, again, there is another complication. In its content, the
father’s essay is all about anchor, about presence as thick as October
honey, about the way the living and the dead cohabit the lush, darkened
landscape of Karabakh. Vahe Oshagan writes: “What boundless optimism,
what blind faith must one have to cart Bibles to the top of this
deserted mountain, where the people’s struggle for their daily bread
does not leave them time to catch their breath.” The son, by contrast,
sees mostly movement, passings, actions and gestures. It is telling
that there are very few photographs here of depopulated landscape. The
emphasis is always on the living and roiling, the animals included.
***
Father Land is also Ara Oshagan’s first major, book-length work as
a photographer intent on looking at the known, but also beyond the
known-looking at knots of uncertainty, or creating them. Vahe Oshagan
prepares for this when he writes, addressing the reader: “Like you
and with you, we, the authors, do not know how this adventure-journey
will end, and will not until we have turned the last page. Every
time we leaf through this album, that truth may be different, and the
discovery of it as fresh as each new reading.” It is the writer who
writes these words, but the medium which fully exploits this idea is
not so much his text but photography itself.
All these complications-intentional, generative-are the modernist’s
bread and butter. Father and son-both products of dispersion, several
resettlements in major urban centers-take up the journey through the
land of certainties that is Karabakh. The tension is a given, sneaks
up at every turn of the page, lurks in the folds of every photograph.
All this, and more, is implicated in the act of reading this volume,
of looking at the photographs. All this heaviness. And Father Land
is indeed a heavy book, several books, in fact, compressed into a
handsome, well-designed and meticulously produced volume. From the
concept, to the typeface, to the photographs, to the quality of the
paper, Father Land is a dense, weighty work of witness, or as the
father says, “testimonial to the truth.”
What are the characteristics of this testimonial for the photographer?
Perhaps the most significant element is related to this idea of making
the visible invisible, or half-visible, of intervening in such a way
that the familiar becomes strange, becomes almost unrecognizable,
as though we are in front of a visual puzzle. In practical terms,
this element reveals itself in where the photographer places himself
in relation to the photographs. He is certainly not a passive receiver
of visual impressions, but he is neither engaged; he’s somewhere off
center, almost at the edge. You could say he is displaced. (The word
choice there is intentional.) His gaze seems to go beyond what is in
the foreground: the woman in the window in the back holding an infant
while men are smoking and playing backgammon in the foreground; or the
thick mist behind a bride and groom getting ready for a picture; or the
young girl skipping across the corridor in the back while the mother’s
presence is a kind of in-your-face intrusion; or the carcass of an
old car in the back while children play in the sand in front of us.
At other times, the scene is clearly off kilter, at an odd angel,
with the personages either jumping out of the photograph or
submerged in it. In fact asymmetry is an organizational principle
in these photographs; it is as dramatic as it is disconcerting, as
if the personages (and there are a lot of human presences in these
photographs) were hemmed in by the frame, squeezed and left out to
dry. Asymmetry is also the companion of tension, and almost every
single photograph in this book carries some sort of tightness,
as though the scene is merely the facade of something far more
complicated that we do not see but are invited to imagine.
In their homes, in their churches, but most strikingly we see them
with their animals, the individuals of these photographs seem to carry
their hard-earned dignity on their shoulder; they are not content and
happy but rather unrelenting. And in each photograph and between and
among photographs a narrative is taking place, a narrative which is
only half-visible, at best. It is no coincidence, therefore, that
many of the photographs carry a palpable darkness, a weightiness;
even the hens and dogs are black-all of which is suggestive of the
hard lives these people lead, but also of what the photographer finds
exciting about what he is photographing, what is open to question,
what is worth re-visiting many times.
The Karabakh which is displayed in these photographs is far from
the certitudes we, in the diaspora, attribute to the place. Not
so much the hardness, the steadfastness, but more of the brew of
the living and the dead, the ghosts and the presences, the visible
and the invisible, the emergent but also the residual. In fact,
Ara Oshagan alludes to this notion of emergence in his Afterword,
which I think he fixes not in what is close to us as we look at these
photographs but in what is far, in the distance, away from the center,
at the edges-which is where “the testimonial to the truth” is located,
or perhaps more accurately, dislocated.
In his essay, Vahe Oshagan, referring to Stepanakert, asks “When is
a city born? When does it mature? When does it acquire an identity?
There is just one answer to all three questions: when it looks death
in the eye.” So, too, with populations such as the people of Karabakh
where death is intertwined with life, has left its indelible mark on
everything. That’s the bedrock truth, the one certainty, but the look
itself-as revealed in Father Land, in the eyes of the generations
that inhabit its pages- is far from simple in intent and result,
journey and destination, discovery and return.
From: Baghdasarian