In the northern Siberian town of Igarka, which is located 163 kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle, around 4,000 inhabitants live today. You can’t hear much of the Latvian language there, although some locals still remember and sometimes even use a few words, such as “thank you” and “hello”. Igarka is a city built on the bones of Soviet prisoners and exiles, residents of occupied Latvia were also deported there. In 1952, photographer Georg Avetisyan’s mother, Inta, was born there, and her grandmother Milda, who was deported in 1941, spent 15 years there. A couple of years ago, Avetisyan went to research and look for her mother’s birthplace – it became a journey from the present to the future along the railway tracks of those deported from the past.
As a result of Avetisyan’s search, the “photo book” “Motherland. Far Beyond the Polar Circle” (“Motherland. Far Beyond the Polar Circle”, 2023) was created. I deliberately put “photobook” in quotation marks, because in fact it is something much bigger, the genre of this work is difficult to define. In an elegantly designed box, next to the photobook itself, readers (Avetisyan says “viewers”) will also find voluminous archive materials, excerpts from various press releases, interviews with the residents of Igarka, his own diary and several other things that form a single story of experience – about deportations, history, home and family. A “Kickstarter” crowdfunding campaign was launched for the publication of the book “Motherland”, and in a few months almost 35,000 euros were collected. On July 3, the Latvian Railway History Museum in Riga will host the opening event not only of the book, but also of the exhibition dedicated to it, which is organized with the help of the “Art Needs a Space” foundation.
“The photographer tries to freeze a moment that will be dead in a moment,” says Avetisyan. In 2016, he obtained a master’s degree in photography at the University of Brighton in Great Britain, he also studied with the legendary Latvian photographer Andrejs Grant. Together with the director and cinematographer Kārli Berg, Avetisyan curates the excellent photo book publishing house “Milda books”. It also publishes “Motherland”, which is the second book of Avetisyan’s trilogy; the first – “Homeland. The longest village in the country” (2018) – is a nostalgic message about his birthplace Kalteni, while the third will be dedicated to his father, whose native side is the Caucasus.
We’ve known each other for over 20 years, but I’ve never asked you this before. Tell me, how did you become interested in photography? What attracted you to it?
It started at an early age thanks to Andrew Grant, who was a friend of my father’s. In their youth, they spent quite a lot of time together, and he also photographed his father, they were black and white pictures. Photographs of my father, my family, various historical events were kept in a drawer in our home. I walked through them as a child, getting to know my father who died when I was very young. I guess I somehow unconsciously realized how powerful photography is, especially if it is aesthetic and of high quality. I think that was a start. But I didn’t realize that I could do it yet.
I come from Kurzeme, Roja and Kaltene. There was no opportunity to learn photography there. When I finished high school in Rojas, I entered university and studied graphic design. We had one course – “Introduction to photography” – with (cinematographer Jānis) Milbret, who gave me the technical basics of photography, it was 2004. Then I started shooting with film, I realized that I was passionate about it and I could do it. After four years, in 2008, I came to Andrejs Grants at Annas iela 2 (Riga), where I got to know photography as a philosophy, learned the basics of black and white photography, copying, film development. It was there that I became interested in photo books, I began to understand the unique possibilities of this medium.
2023-07-02 21:01:20
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