Photographer Ara Oshagan and author Krikor Beledian grew up in Beirut's Armenian communities formed by refugees and survivors of genocide. They came of age in families and streets fraught with the collective memory of extreme violence and dispossession. Both left Beirut decades ago and now return, carrying their own histories of displacement, to immerse themselves in its fractured urbanscape.
Oshagan wades through the spaces and narrow neighborhoods of his past to create dark and lyrical photographs that straddle the line between documentary and narrative: an attempt to articulate his own ambiguous relationship to place and history.
While Beledian, the preeminent author of the Armenian diaspora, drawing from his decades-long research and literary work about these communities, pens an original and poetic semi-autobiographical text based on his youth in the same spaces.
Set in Beirut's dense Armenian neighborhoods of Bourj Hammoud, displaced brings these two symbiotic and deeply personal works of literature and photography together: a unique collaboration interrogating diasporic identity, multi-generational displacement, and the ambiguities of narrative.
Photographs by Ara Oshagan
Text by Krikor Beledian
Translation by Taline Voskeritchian, Chris Millis
