© Ara Oshagan, Vank 2006Ara Oshagan’s Karabagh Album:
Fathers and Sons and other Witnesses
by Christopher Atamian
In 1999 Ara Oshagan traveled to Karabagh with his now-deceased father, the poet Vahe Oshagan, to record the fledgling republic in photos. Karabagh had recently emerged victorious in a war of secession from Azerbaijian and much of the region was in tatters—the capital Stepanakert, today a relatively clean, functioning city of 50,000 was destroyed : images of Dresden after the Allied bombings come to mind.
In a beautiful study that is scheduled for publication in Fall 2010 on Powerhouse Books (around 160 pages and 60 photos) Oshagan sets out to witness and record the region in its post-war state. What are Oshagan’s goals then in this work and what do his photographs represent and tell us about Karabagh and ourselves ? Vahe Oshagan notes in his foreword : “Like every Armenian who is familiar with the events that have taken place here in the last decade, we also crossed the Armenia-Karabagh border with pride and humility. But we are artists and our instruments, the pen and camera, cannot be used as a pastime, nor for propaganda nor for financial gain, but only for art, only as an act of witness.” For Ara Oshagan who has in the past photographed Armenian Genocide survivors (“iwitness”), inmates in a Los Angeles prison (“Traces of Identity”) and the L.A. Ethiopian community (“Building Community”) witnessing comes naturally. Yet the act of witnessing is problematic for all sorts of concrete and theoretical reasons—beginning with the fact that photography is a selective process: the shot, the pose, the selection of color and paper, the edit, the presentation; all these aspects of this art form lend a complex history to any given shot, even the most seemingly innocent. A simple digital shot taken in a coffee shop by two friends follows a whole set of conventions, from the smile to the pose, to the ultimate purpose of the shot, i.e. private viewing or perhaps a facebook entry. On a theoretical level—as Marc Nichanian has eloquently pointed out—witnessing, especially within an Armenian context, becomes an almost mad act of trying to prove the unprovable over and over again. Oshagan’s particular brand of photography—the photodocumentary—is in a sense a variant of photojournalism, an art form rich in history dating back to the First World War and to magazines such as Vu and Life. In Regarding the Pain of Others (1) Susan Sontag explores how photography connects humans to events in far-off locales. Photographs, Sontag notes, first exposed the world to the horrors of war: death, destruction, the human suffering etched, say, on the faces of survivors of Auschwitz, the emaciated bodies of Armenian deportees in 1915 or the soul-searing picture of Phan Thi Kim Phúc, the little Vietnamese girl caught screaming naked on a road after an American napalm bombing. Photographs, according to Sontag, combine an objective factor (a “trace” of events) and a subjective one (the individual agency of the photographer). Photojournalism becomes an act of witnessing and recording a particular time, place and event. If I understand Vahe Oshagan’s statement, then what his son Ara is attempting here is a post-war witnessing that projects the past (the war that he did not in fact witness first hand) into the present (which he does photograph with remarkable equanimity and grace) and the future, present it seems on every face, in every subject included, who all seem to implicitly ask: what is my future? What will happen to us ? And while at different times photojournalism has pled for different things (an end to war, intervention by a super power, to record crimes against humanity etc), Oshagan’s goal seems more neutral though not completely innocent, a moral element present nonetheless, i.e. an attempt to record human suffering and triumph and to contribute to Karabakh’s understanding of itself. Here his photographs appear to be saying : look at these people, see their dignity, see their poverty, they have fought for their freedom. Honor this. Do not forget them.
It is not a simple thing that Oshagan is asking of us. His photographs are not simply “crude statements of fact addressed to the eye,” as Virginia Wolf once called them, but complex, heartfelt glimpses, traces laden with history, personal and otherwise. Oshagan’s photographs challenge us not to give in to what Sontag terms “compassion fatigue.” They do not depict anything particularly cruel or violent; they are mostly domestic or village scenes—but behind each one there is a past of war, a present of suffering, and a future of uncertainty. What we are given then in Oshagan’s Karabagh are traces in time and space.
At the same time, Oshagan’s book is inscribed within a paternal sign or lineage—it’s a book about fathers, produced with a father, by a father—it is paternally over-determined and raises the question of the link between photography, fatherhood and witnessing: the father as photographer, the photographer as witness, and finally the father as witness, a remarkable transitivity of function and identity.
In order to read Oshagan’s photographs themselves, I will turn to Roland Barthes’ 1980 book Camera Lucida where the French theoretician distinguishes between a picture’s studium and punctum, i.e. a picture’s topic or theme on the one hand and its point or quality of interest, on the other. Luc Sante explains these two terms in more detail in a Fall 2009 essay in Aperture Magazine :
"The studium is the photograph’s aspect of obvious interest: the time-frame, the architecture, the clothes, the dirt street, the train wreck, the corpse. The punctum, on the other hand, is the aspect of a photograph that seizes the viewer, that engages the emotions. It is most often an uncalculated detail, although it can be something affecting the image as a whole or the manner of its physical reproduction, or even extraneous information…a deliberate choice made by the photographer but more often it is an accidental detail, or a contingent matter beyond the photographer’s control or even awareness.” (2)
The following pictures that I discuss can be found at www.araoshagan.com. In Picture Number 2, the studium is a man smoking, head tilted slightly backwards with a young girl, presumably his daughter, in a white shirt in front of him and a window framing him in the back. The punctum is the man’s flicked wrist and gesture, which codes as effeminate in the west. A powerful disjuncture exists between the girl—attentive as if she were concentrating on a toy or drawing something and the man’s gaze upwards and away. Picture Number 3 : the inside of a poor wooden house, with a television on a console covered in old, cheap cloth. Clothes hang on pegs; cleaning utensils and a wash basin lay out in the open. The punctum isn’t the boy in the background who sits in a strange position on the stairs, but the light bulb that hangs ominously in the photograph’s front plane—looking more like a hangman’s rope than an electric fixture. It’s a study in both absence and sadness. A secondary punctum is the—at least to Western eyes—strange wooden geography of the stairs and food storage facilities in the back. Picture 6, a typical living room, draws the eye to a lovely triangular composition delineated by the mother’s face, the boy on the sofa, and girl traversing the hall. The punctum is the odd half-turned position of the girl and perhaps on a minor level the wall fixture over the boy’s right shoulder that seems to glow, seemingly surrounded by white paint or plaster.
Undoubtedly one of Oshagan’s finest photographs, Picture Number 10 depicts Karabagh soldiers walking through deep trenches, the close-up of the soldiers taken from the back with a lone tree standing mournfully below a desolate sky, and two more soldiers farther up front. So much for the picture’s studium. Its punctum, I would argue, lies in the archeology of the trench itself, the long sinewy curve that snakes and divides the photograph, as if the Earth itself had been cleaved in two, perhaps an apt metaphor for what transpired in Karabagh during the war and the suffering visited upon its people.
In Picture 12, a village shot, a wizened old man smokes while a boy plays in the background in the street, the architecture and geometry of the town in the background. The punctum is the puff of light that surrounds the old man and the twinkles of light that are perhaps (intentionallly or not ?) reflections off the camera lens. In Picture Number 13 an old woman hugs the funeral headstone of her deceased soldier son or grandson, sorrow visible on her creased face and closed eyes-the punctae are the two strangely hieratic replicas of dead soldiers. The Armenian letters on the side of the headstone she hugs read Tavit, or David.
Picture Number 16 is one of the most visually accomplished in the series, a curious dance of bodies and shadows : a man stands hands on hips in the foreground, a girl seen from the back facing the store as she plays hopscotch, and against the same store wall three shadows, of two men and a tree. The punctum is the shadow of a man in the lower left-hand smoking, his palm under his chin, looking almost like some science fiction wood imp, as well as the stop-nature of the shot, the utter strangeness of people caught in mid motion. Unlike the other photographs in the series, this one could have been taken anywhere : Paris, Beirut, Los Angeles etc…
For Oshagan, Picture 17 is the fulcrum or central point of this series. While it looks like it might be a doubly or triply exposed photograph, the studium is actually a straight shot of an old man looking into a semi-circular store front composed of large panes of reflective glass set as slight angles which act as mirrors—the photographer’s reflection is hidden and the overall effect is of a semi-circle of mirrors which reflects everything behind the photographer. The punctum : the old man twice reflected, his image a symbol of loneliness and abandonment which also simultaneously symbolizes, as Oshagan relates in an e-mail, the idea of emergence, of Karabagh as a nation and of the photographer’s self-emergence as a father and perhaps an artist as well.
Picture Number 19 of children playing on top of abandoned military vehicles—the studium—also has another interesting punctum, a lost puppy to whom our attention is drawn because of the picture’s composition and the fact that the dog appears to be hanging on for dear life. In Picture 22, inside an apartment, the studium or ostensible topic is the girl walking by (into the future perhaps) and the man in front of the mirror walking towards us. The punctum, I would argue, is the play of light and dark and the strange mirror that reflects back nothingness from the dark.
The strongest aspect of Oshagan’s work is his depiction of ordinary people, in this case Karabaghtsis searching like the photographer to make sense out of their lives and out of the the rubble of war. There are, of course, few recurring stories more compelling than the paternal parable as it has come to us in Western mythologies : the Old Testament, one long tale of begetting, of who fathered whom, a genealogical record of the early Hebrews; or more tragically (as usual) with the Greeks who relate how Cronus ate his own children out of fear that they would one day supplant him (and Zeus, his sixth child, out of revenge eventually did !). Oshagan’s wife Anahid gave birth to his four sons during the length of this project. His photographic tale is also one of fathers and sons, less angry than the Torah, less bloody than Greek mythology. It is a tale of becoming, of a land coming into its own, of a photographer doing so as well, a son taking the place of a deceased father, having come back to his mythical and historical fatherland. Finally Oshagan is also symbolically the son of the many Armenian photographers and lithographers who founded and enriched this art form and trade in the Middle East at the turn of the twentieth century, down to Yousuf Karsh the great Canadian-Armenian portraitist. Any way you look at it, Oshagan’s Karabagh is a touching and powerful record of a land and its people.
Notes
1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2004.
2. Luc Sante, "Folk Photography", Aperture, New York, Fall 2009.
For more pictures, go to: www.araoshagan.com
For Powerhouse Books go to: powerhousebooks.com
In a beautiful study that is scheduled for publication in Fall 2010 on Powerhouse Books (around 160 pages and 60 photos) Oshagan sets out to witness and record the region in its post-war state. What are Oshagan’s goals then in this work and what do his photographs represent and tell us about Karabagh and ourselves ? Vahe Oshagan notes in his foreword : “Like every Armenian who is familiar with the events that have taken place here in the last decade, we also crossed the Armenia-Karabagh border with pride and humility. But we are artists and our instruments, the pen and camera, cannot be used as a pastime, nor for propaganda nor for financial gain, but only for art, only as an act of witness.” For Ara Oshagan who has in the past photographed Armenian Genocide survivors (“iwitness”), inmates in a Los Angeles prison (“Traces of Identity”) and the L.A. Ethiopian community (“Building Community”) witnessing comes naturally. Yet the act of witnessing is problematic for all sorts of concrete and theoretical reasons—beginning with the fact that photography is a selective process: the shot, the pose, the selection of color and paper, the edit, the presentation; all these aspects of this art form lend a complex history to any given shot, even the most seemingly innocent. A simple digital shot taken in a coffee shop by two friends follows a whole set of conventions, from the smile to the pose, to the ultimate purpose of the shot, i.e. private viewing or perhaps a facebook entry. On a theoretical level—as Marc Nichanian has eloquently pointed out—witnessing, especially within an Armenian context, becomes an almost mad act of trying to prove the unprovable over and over again. Oshagan’s particular brand of photography—the photodocumentary—is in a sense a variant of photojournalism, an art form rich in history dating back to the First World War and to magazines such as Vu and Life. In Regarding the Pain of Others (1) Susan Sontag explores how photography connects humans to events in far-off locales. Photographs, Sontag notes, first exposed the world to the horrors of war: death, destruction, the human suffering etched, say, on the faces of survivors of Auschwitz, the emaciated bodies of Armenian deportees in 1915 or the soul-searing picture of Phan Thi Kim Phúc, the little Vietnamese girl caught screaming naked on a road after an American napalm bombing. Photographs, according to Sontag, combine an objective factor (a “trace” of events) and a subjective one (the individual agency of the photographer). Photojournalism becomes an act of witnessing and recording a particular time, place and event. If I understand Vahe Oshagan’s statement, then what his son Ara is attempting here is a post-war witnessing that projects the past (the war that he did not in fact witness first hand) into the present (which he does photograph with remarkable equanimity and grace) and the future, present it seems on every face, in every subject included, who all seem to implicitly ask: what is my future? What will happen to us ? And while at different times photojournalism has pled for different things (an end to war, intervention by a super power, to record crimes against humanity etc), Oshagan’s goal seems more neutral though not completely innocent, a moral element present nonetheless, i.e. an attempt to record human suffering and triumph and to contribute to Karabakh’s understanding of itself. Here his photographs appear to be saying : look at these people, see their dignity, see their poverty, they have fought for their freedom. Honor this. Do not forget them.
It is not a simple thing that Oshagan is asking of us. His photographs are not simply “crude statements of fact addressed to the eye,” as Virginia Wolf once called them, but complex, heartfelt glimpses, traces laden with history, personal and otherwise. Oshagan’s photographs challenge us not to give in to what Sontag terms “compassion fatigue.” They do not depict anything particularly cruel or violent; they are mostly domestic or village scenes—but behind each one there is a past of war, a present of suffering, and a future of uncertainty. What we are given then in Oshagan’s Karabagh are traces in time and space.
At the same time, Oshagan’s book is inscribed within a paternal sign or lineage—it’s a book about fathers, produced with a father, by a father—it is paternally over-determined and raises the question of the link between photography, fatherhood and witnessing: the father as photographer, the photographer as witness, and finally the father as witness, a remarkable transitivity of function and identity.
In order to read Oshagan’s photographs themselves, I will turn to Roland Barthes’ 1980 book Camera Lucida where the French theoretician distinguishes between a picture’s studium and punctum, i.e. a picture’s topic or theme on the one hand and its point or quality of interest, on the other. Luc Sante explains these two terms in more detail in a Fall 2009 essay in Aperture Magazine :
"The studium is the photograph’s aspect of obvious interest: the time-frame, the architecture, the clothes, the dirt street, the train wreck, the corpse. The punctum, on the other hand, is the aspect of a photograph that seizes the viewer, that engages the emotions. It is most often an uncalculated detail, although it can be something affecting the image as a whole or the manner of its physical reproduction, or even extraneous information…a deliberate choice made by the photographer but more often it is an accidental detail, or a contingent matter beyond the photographer’s control or even awareness.” (2)
The following pictures that I discuss can be found at www.araoshagan.com. In Picture Number 2, the studium is a man smoking, head tilted slightly backwards with a young girl, presumably his daughter, in a white shirt in front of him and a window framing him in the back. The punctum is the man’s flicked wrist and gesture, which codes as effeminate in the west. A powerful disjuncture exists between the girl—attentive as if she were concentrating on a toy or drawing something and the man’s gaze upwards and away. Picture Number 3 : the inside of a poor wooden house, with a television on a console covered in old, cheap cloth. Clothes hang on pegs; cleaning utensils and a wash basin lay out in the open. The punctum isn’t the boy in the background who sits in a strange position on the stairs, but the light bulb that hangs ominously in the photograph’s front plane—looking more like a hangman’s rope than an electric fixture. It’s a study in both absence and sadness. A secondary punctum is the—at least to Western eyes—strange wooden geography of the stairs and food storage facilities in the back. Picture 6, a typical living room, draws the eye to a lovely triangular composition delineated by the mother’s face, the boy on the sofa, and girl traversing the hall. The punctum is the odd half-turned position of the girl and perhaps on a minor level the wall fixture over the boy’s right shoulder that seems to glow, seemingly surrounded by white paint or plaster.
Undoubtedly one of Oshagan’s finest photographs, Picture Number 10 depicts Karabagh soldiers walking through deep trenches, the close-up of the soldiers taken from the back with a lone tree standing mournfully below a desolate sky, and two more soldiers farther up front. So much for the picture’s studium. Its punctum, I would argue, lies in the archeology of the trench itself, the long sinewy curve that snakes and divides the photograph, as if the Earth itself had been cleaved in two, perhaps an apt metaphor for what transpired in Karabagh during the war and the suffering visited upon its people.
In Picture 12, a village shot, a wizened old man smokes while a boy plays in the background in the street, the architecture and geometry of the town in the background. The punctum is the puff of light that surrounds the old man and the twinkles of light that are perhaps (intentionallly or not ?) reflections off the camera lens. In Picture Number 13 an old woman hugs the funeral headstone of her deceased soldier son or grandson, sorrow visible on her creased face and closed eyes-the punctae are the two strangely hieratic replicas of dead soldiers. The Armenian letters on the side of the headstone she hugs read Tavit, or David.
Picture Number 16 is one of the most visually accomplished in the series, a curious dance of bodies and shadows : a man stands hands on hips in the foreground, a girl seen from the back facing the store as she plays hopscotch, and against the same store wall three shadows, of two men and a tree. The punctum is the shadow of a man in the lower left-hand smoking, his palm under his chin, looking almost like some science fiction wood imp, as well as the stop-nature of the shot, the utter strangeness of people caught in mid motion. Unlike the other photographs in the series, this one could have been taken anywhere : Paris, Beirut, Los Angeles etc…
For Oshagan, Picture 17 is the fulcrum or central point of this series. While it looks like it might be a doubly or triply exposed photograph, the studium is actually a straight shot of an old man looking into a semi-circular store front composed of large panes of reflective glass set as slight angles which act as mirrors—the photographer’s reflection is hidden and the overall effect is of a semi-circle of mirrors which reflects everything behind the photographer. The punctum : the old man twice reflected, his image a symbol of loneliness and abandonment which also simultaneously symbolizes, as Oshagan relates in an e-mail, the idea of emergence, of Karabagh as a nation and of the photographer’s self-emergence as a father and perhaps an artist as well.
Picture Number 19 of children playing on top of abandoned military vehicles—the studium—also has another interesting punctum, a lost puppy to whom our attention is drawn because of the picture’s composition and the fact that the dog appears to be hanging on for dear life. In Picture 22, inside an apartment, the studium or ostensible topic is the girl walking by (into the future perhaps) and the man in front of the mirror walking towards us. The punctum, I would argue, is the play of light and dark and the strange mirror that reflects back nothingness from the dark.
The strongest aspect of Oshagan’s work is his depiction of ordinary people, in this case Karabaghtsis searching like the photographer to make sense out of their lives and out of the the rubble of war. There are, of course, few recurring stories more compelling than the paternal parable as it has come to us in Western mythologies : the Old Testament, one long tale of begetting, of who fathered whom, a genealogical record of the early Hebrews; or more tragically (as usual) with the Greeks who relate how Cronus ate his own children out of fear that they would one day supplant him (and Zeus, his sixth child, out of revenge eventually did !). Oshagan’s wife Anahid gave birth to his four sons during the length of this project. His photographic tale is also one of fathers and sons, less angry than the Torah, less bloody than Greek mythology. It is a tale of becoming, of a land coming into its own, of a photographer doing so as well, a son taking the place of a deceased father, having come back to his mythical and historical fatherland. Finally Oshagan is also symbolically the son of the many Armenian photographers and lithographers who founded and enriched this art form and trade in the Middle East at the turn of the twentieth century, down to Yousuf Karsh the great Canadian-Armenian portraitist. Any way you look at it, Oshagan’s Karabagh is a touching and powerful record of a land and its people.
Notes
1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2004.
2. Luc Sante, "Folk Photography", Aperture, New York, Fall 2009.
For more pictures, go to: www.araoshagan.com
For Powerhouse Books go to: powerhousebooks.com
_________
L’album Karabagh d’Ara Oshagan :
pères et fils et autres témoins
par Christopher Atamian
En 1999 Ara Oshagan se rend au Karabagh avec son père décédé depuis, le poète Vahé Oshagan, afin de conserver une trace photographique de cette république naissante. Le Karabagh venait de sortir victorieux d’une guerre de sécession avec l’Azerbaïdjan et une grande partie de cette région était désolée – la capitale, Stepanakert, une ville aujourd’hui relativement propre, fonctionnelle, de 50 000 habitants, était détruite : l’on songe aux images de Dresde après les bombardements alliés.
Dans une belle étude dont la publication est prévue à l’automne 2010 aux éditions Powerhouse (quelque 160 pages et 60 photographies), Oshagan se propose de témoigner et de garder une trace de cette région lors de son après-guerre. Quels sont alors les objectifs de son travail et que représentent ses clichés ? Que nous apprennent-ils sur le Karabagh et nous-mêmes ? Vahé Oshagan note dans son avant-propos : « Comme tout Arménien familiarisé avec les événements qui ont eu lieu ici ces dix dernières années, nous franchissons aussi la frontière entre l’Arménie et le Karabagh avec fierté et humilité. Or nous sommes des artistes et nos outils, stylo et caméra, ne sauraient tenir lieu de passe-temps, ni servir à des fins de propagande ou lucratives, mais seulement artistiques, en tant que témoignage. » Pour Ara Oshagan, qui a par le passé photographié des survivants du génocide (série iwitness), des prisonniers à Los Angeles (Traces of Identity) et la communauté éthiopienne de Los Angeles (Building Community), témoigner est chose naturelle. Or l’action de témoigner est problématique pour toutes sortes de raisons concrètes et théoriques – à commencer par le fait que la photographie est un processus sélectif : la prise, la pose, le choix de la couleur et du papier, l’édition, la présentation ; tous ces aspects de cette forme artistique confèrent une histoire complexe à chaque cliché, même celui apparemment le plus anodin. Un simple cliché numérique pris dans un café par deux amis obéit à toute une série de conventions, du sourire à la pose, et au but ultime du cliché, à savoir un point de vue personnel ou peut-être un article sur Facebook. Au niveau théorique – comme l’a souligné avec éloquence Marc Nichanian – témoigner, en particulier dans un contexte arménien, se transforme en une tentative quasi désespérée de prouver encore et encore l’improuvable. La marque particulière du photographe qu’est Oshagan – le photodocumentaire – constitue dans un certain sens une variante du photojournalisme, une forme artistique riche en histoire qui remonte à la Première Guerre mondiale et à des revues telles que Vu et Life. Dans Regarding the Pain of Others [Devant la douleur des autres] (1), Susan Sontag explore la manière avec laquelle la photographie relie les êtres humains à des événements situés dans des lieux très éloignés. Les photographies, note Sontag, ont tout d’abord exposé au monde les horreurs de la guerre : la mort, la destruction, la souffrance humaine inscrite, par exemple, sur les visages des survivants d’Auschwitz, les corps émaciés des déportés arméniens en 1915 ou ce cliché atroce de Phan Thi Kim Phúc, cette fillette vietnamienne photographie hurlant nue sur une route après un bombardement américain au napalm. Les photographies, selon Sontag, combinent un facteur objectif (une « trace » des événements) à un facteur subjectif (l’action individuelle du photographe). Le photojournalisme devient un acte de témoignage et d’enregistrement d’un moment, d’un lieu et d’un événement particuliers. Si je comprends bien ce que dit Vahé Oshagan, ce que tente là son fils Ara est un témoignage d’après-guerre qui projette le passé (la guerre dont il n’a pas été, en fait, témoin de première main) dans le présent (qu’il photographie avec une sérénité et une grâce remarquables) et l’avenir, qui semblent présents sur chaque visage, y compris à chaque propos, lesquels semblent tous demander implicitement : quel est mon avenir ? Que va-t-il nous arriver ? Et tandis qu’à différentes époques le photojournalisme s’est fait l’avocat de causes diverses (mettre fin à une guerre, à l’intervention d’une superpuissance, garder une trace des crimes contre l’humanité, etc), l’objectif d’Oshagan semble davantage neutre, bien que partiellement innocent, avec une composante morale néanmoins présente, à savoir une tentative pour garder une trace des souffrances et du triomphe des hommes et pour contribuer à la compréhension du Karabagh lui-même. C’est là que ses photographies semblent dire : regardez ces gens, voyez leur dignité, voyez leur pauvreté, ils ont combattu pour leur liberté. Rendez-leur hommage. Ne les oubliez pas.
Ce que nous demande Oshagan n’est pas simple. Ses photographies ne sont pas simplement « des énoncés bruts de la réalité donnés à voir », pour reprendre l’expression de Virginia Woolf, mais des aperçus complexes, sincères, des documents chargés d’histoire, d’émotions personnelles et autres. Les photographies d’Oshagan nous incitent à ne pas tomber dans ce que Sontag nomme la « fatigue compassionnelle ». Elles ne représentent rien de particulièrement cruel ou violent ; ce sont surtout des scènes familiales ou rurales – mais derrière chacune d’elles existe un passé de guerre, un présent de souffrances et un avenir d’incertitude. Ce que nous livre le Karabagh d’Oshagan ce sont des documents inscrits dans le temps et l’espace.
Parallèlement, l’ouvrage d’Oshagan s’inscrit dans une geste paternelle, une lignée – il s’agit d’un livre sur les pères, produit avec un père, par un père – un livre paternellement sur-déterminé, abordant la question du lien entre photographie, paternité et témoignage : le père comme photographe, le photographe comme témoin, et finalement le père comme témoin, circulation étonnante entre fonction et identité.
Pour lire les photographies d’Oshagan, je citerai l’ouvrage de Roland Barthes, paru en 1980, Camera Lucida, où ce théoricien français distingue entre studium et punctum d’une image, à savoir le propos ou le sujet d’une image d’un côté et, de l’autre, son centre d’intérêt ou la qualité de ce dernier. Luc Sante explique plus en détail ces deux termes dans un article paru dans la revue Aperture à l’automne 2009 :
« Le studium est le côté intérêt évident d’une photographie ; le cadre temporel, l’architecture, les vêtements, une rue sale, les débris d’un train, le cadavre. Le punctum, d’autre part, concerne l’aspect d’une photographie qui retient l’observateur, qui engage des émotions. Il s’agit le plus souvent d’un détail imprévu, bien que cela puisse affecter l’image en totalité ou la modalité de sa reproduction physique, ou même une information superflue… un choix délibéré opéré par le photographe, mais le plus souvent il s’agit d’un détail accidentel ou d’un sujet contingent, échappant au contrôle ou même à la conscience du photographe. » (2)
Les photographies dont je vais traiter sont accessibles sur www.araoshagan.com. Sur le cliché n° 2, le studium est un homme qui fume, la tête légèrement penchée en arrière avec une fillette, probablement sa fille, en chemise blanche face à lui, et encadré dans une fenêtre à l’arrière-plan. Le punctum est ce poing écarté, ce geste de l’homme, connoté comme efféminé à l’ouest. Un décalage fort se dégage entre la jeune fille – attentive comme si elle se concentrait sur un jouet ou dessinant quelque chose, et le regard de l’homme vers le haut et l’ailleurs. Cliché n° 3 : l’intérieur d’une maisonnette en bois, avec une télévision sur une console recouverte d’un vieux vêtement bon marché. Des habits pendent à des patères ; des ustensiles de nettoyage et une cuvette sont disposés au dehors. Le punctum n’est pas le jeune garçon à l’arrière-plan, assis dans une position étrange sur les marches, mais l’ampoule qui pend d’une manière sinistre en plan frontal sur la photographie – ressemblant davantage à la corde d’un bourreau qu’à un appareillage électrique. Il s’agit d’une étude portant à la fois sur l’absence et la tristesse. Un punctum secondaire – du moins pour un regard occidental – réside dans cette étrange géographie en bois des marches et des équipements de rangement pour l’alimentation en arrière-plan. Le cliché 6, un salon d’intérieur typique, attire le regard vers une adorable composition triangulaire délimitée par le visage de la mère, le garçon sur le canapé et la jeune fille traversant le hall. Le punctum est la position étrange, à demi renversée, de la jeune fille et, à un moindre niveau peut-être, la décoration murale au-dessus de l’épaule droite du garçon qui semble rayonner, entourée apparemment de peinture blanche ou de plâtre.
Le cliché n° 10, sans nul doute une des plus belles photographies d’Oshagan, représente des combattants du Karabagh parcourant de profondes tranchées, des soldats en gros plan, vus de dos, avec un arbre isolé se dressant tristement sous un ciel désolé, et deux autres soldats plus en avant. Voilà pour le studium du cliché. Son punctum, dirais-je, réside dans le côté archéologique de cette même tranchée, cette longue courbe énergique qui serpente et divise la photographie, comme si la Terre elle-même était clivée en deux, une possible métaphore de ce qui transpira au Karabagh lors de la guerre et des souffrances qui s’abattirent sur sa population.
Sur le cliché 12, une vue d’un village, un vieil homme ratatiné fume, tandis qu’un jeune garçon joue en arrière-plan dans la rue, avec pour toile de fond l’architecture et la géométrie de la ville. Le punctum est cette aura de lumière qui entoure le vieil homme et le scintillement de lumière qui sont peut-être (intentionnellement ou non ?) des reflets de l’objectif. Sur le cliché n° 13 une femme âgée étreint la stèle funéraire de son fils ou de son petit-fils, mort au combat, le chagrin visible sur son visage ridé et ses yeux clos – les punctae sont les deux répliques étrangement hiératiques de soldats morts. On lit en caractères arméniens sur le côté de la stèle Tavit, David.
Le cliché n° 16 est l’un des plus achevés visuellement de cette série, danse singulière de corps et d’ombres : un homme se tient debout, les mains sur les hanches au premier plan, une jeune fille vue de dos fait face à un magasin en jouant à la marelle, et contre ce même magasin trois ombres, celles de deux hommes et d’un arbre. Le punctum est l’ombre d’un homme sur le côté inférieur gauche, en train de fumer, son poing sous le menton, ayant l’air de quelque farfadet de science-fiction, tout comme cet arrêt sur image, l’étrangeté totale de ces gens saisis en pleine action. Contrairement aux autres photographies de la série, celle-ci aurait pu être prise n’importe où : Paris, Beyrouth, Los Angeles, etc…
Pour Oshagan, le cliché 17 est le pivot ou le point central de cette série. Alors qu’il semble que ce soit une photographie à double ou triple exposition, le studium est en fait le cliché de face d’un vieil homme regardant la façade semi-circulaire d’un magasin, composée de larges vitres de verre réflecteur placées légèrement en angle qui agissent comme des miroirs – le reflet du photographe est dissimulé et l’effet global est celui d’un demi-cercle de miroirs qui reflètent tout ce qui se trouve derrière le photographe. Le punctum : le vieil homme reflété deux fois, son image symbolisant la solitude et l’abandon qui symbolisent aussi simultanément, comme Oshagan le raconte dans un email, l’idée d’émergence, celle du Karabagh en tant que nation et celle personnelle du photographe en tant que père et peut-être aussi comme artiste.
Le cliché n° 19 d’enfants jouant sur des véhicules militaires abandonnés – le studium – possède aussi un autre punctum intéressant, une peluche abandonnée qui attire notre attention à cause de la composition de l’image et du fait que le chien semble plein de vie. Sur le cliché 22, à l’intérieur d’un appartement, le studium ou le sujet manifeste est une fillette se promenant (peut-être dans l’avenir) et l’homme face au miroir s’avançant dans notre direction. Le punctum, dirais-je, est le jeu de lumière et d’ombre et ce miroir étrange reflétant le néant de l’obscurité.
L’aspect le plus fort du travail d’Oshagan est sa représentation des gens ordinaires, en l’occurrence des Karabaghtsis qui tentent, à l’instar du photographe, de donner un sens à leurs vies et aux ravages de la guerre. L’on trouve, bien sûr, certains récits récurrents, davantage frappants que la parabole paternelle telle que nous l’ont transmise les mythologies occidentales : l’Ancien Testament, ce long récit d’engendrement, sur qui fut le père de qui, archive généalogique des premiers Hébreux ; ou plus tragiquement (comme d’habitude) avec les Grecs qui racontent comment Cronos dévora ses propres enfants de peur qu’ils le supplantent un jour (et ce que Zeus, son sixième enfant, par vengeance, finit par faire !). Anahid, l’épouse d’Oshagan, donna naissance à ses quatre fils durant toute la durée de ce projet. Son récit photographique est aussi celui des pères et des fils, moins emporté que la Torah, moins sanglant que la mythologie grecque. Il s’agit d’un récit du devenir, d’une terre s’appropriant son identité, d’un photographe faisant de même, d’un fils prenant la place de son père décédé, revenant dans sa patrie mythique et historique. Oshagan est aussi symboliquement le fils de nombreux photographes et lithographes arméniens qui fondèrent et enrichirent cette forme d’art et ce commerce au Moyen-Orient au tournant du vingtième siècle, jusqu’à Yousuf Karsh, le grand portraitiste arménien canadien. De quelque manière qu’on le considère, le Karabagh d’Oshagan constitue un document émouvant et fort sur une terre et son peuple.
Notes
1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York : Picador, 2004.
2. Luc Sante, « Folk Photography », Aperture, New York, Fall 2009.
Pour plus d’informations, consulter www.araoshagan.com
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Traduction : © Georges Festa – 10.2009
