My discovery of the figure of Arax dates back to 1989, the date on which some extraordinary original photographs of the Spanish Professional Universe Juan Ferrero, dated 1945, fell into my hands. Krikor Djololian, as Gregor Arax was officially called, was born on 27 February 1897 in Adapazar (Turkey) in the bosom of a very humble and poor family.
At a very young age, both Krikor and his two brothers Haig (born in 1893) and Hagop, also known as Siruni (born 4/6/1890), were left orphans of a father (Arakel Djololian, a painter by profession), for this reason and since Economic needs were pressing, they moved together with their mother Mariam to Constantinople (now Istanbul), where she found a job that allowed her children to continue their studies in various prestigious schools such as the Essayan School of Guetronagan.
During the First World War and due to the atrocities of the Armenian genocide of 1915, the three Djololian brothers suffered different fates. At the beginning of the genocide, Hagop Sirouni, who stood out as a journalist, writer and editor of several newspapers, was identified as one of the Armenian intellectuals, managing to escape the raid of April 24 during which 650 Armenian intellectuals from Constantinople were arrested, deported and then massacred for the most part. Thanks to a Greek family that kept him hidden for about three years, he was able to avoid being executed, so in 1920, after surviving the genocide, Hagop Sirouni went to Romania where he developed an outstanding literary career. Hagop died in Bucharest on April 7, 1973. The second of the brothers was worse off, Haig, who was a talented athlete who ended up being assassinated in 1916 while serving in the Ottoman army.
Krikor, the youngest of the three brothers, was arrested and deported in 1915. After the war, he returned to Constantinople, reunited with his family. From 1918 to 1922 he assumed a leadership role within the Armenian Community of survivors, and was dedicated to the organization of athletic competitions. During this period he begins to experiment and develop his photography skills.
In 1922, Krikor and his mother, Mariam, emigrated to Paris, where he resumed his activities as a photographer. He opens a studio at 9 Rue Papillon which he calls Studio Arax. At the beginning of the 1930s it moved to number 31 Boulevard Raspail. During this stage he devoted himself to studio portraits, ballroom dance championships and working as a photojournalist, collaborating with numerous Armenian and Parisian publications portraying the social life of the Parisian Armenian community. At this stage of his working life, an interest in photographing the French capital during the war, the liberation of Paris and the postwar period will also resurface.
From 1934 to 1975, with a short hiatus caused by the Second World War, he began to collaborate with the British magazine Health and Strength. During this time, he traveled the roads of France in his curious and unique car (a Fiat 500 that was better known by the alias of baby mouse), to photograph and immortalize the winners of the bodybuilding competitions of the federations of ‘physical culture’ in France, and occasionally in Belgium, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Five young people, very popular worldwide for their acting careers, Steve Reeves, Reg Park, Mickey Hargitay (Jayne Mansfield’s husband), Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, are immortalized by his camera, fulfilling the criteria of symmetry, harmony and proportion that had been used by the judges in the mythical bodybuilding contest of Mr. Universe NABBA, the most important event in the world of this sport, the open door to success in our discipline, which exalts the best bodybuilders who show the art that is It is imprinted on the body, reflecting the ideal proportions of ancient Greek statues.
In 1936, Gregor Arax married Ebrouhie Nalbandia, a wealthy heir to the Nalbandians, owners of factories and other properties in the city of Sis, in Cilicia. From that union three children were born: Claude, Eddy and Patrice, who without knowing me had the kindness and kindness to help me in the elaboration of this article-tribute to their father.
A few years after the end of the Second World War, photography related to the cult of the body grew steadily, thus emerging the true Golden Age for physical culture magazines. Obviously, the editors realized the commercial vein of this new photographic product, acquired mostly by an elite public, with great purchasing power, who did not skimp on expenses and who, always or almost always, received them clandestinely under the title of artistic magazines. This product led magazines to publish increasingly sensual and erotic images, but always without showing genitalia, however, those who wanted to get full nude photos (which included erections and rarely explicit sexual acts) could get them by asking for them custom made.
Curiously, in a country as puritanical as the United States was then, it is where the greatest demand arises, which causes photographic studios to proliferate. Arax is quickly claimed by North American publications attracted by his talent and his already consolidated reputation, and without thinking much he joins the bandwagon by expanding his business with a new portfolio of more artistic than sporty physical models, and with a style of posing that he produced. images that used to show frontal nudes with total naturalness, dedicating a large part of their production to these images. In order to carry out the sale by mail of this type of images but to expose the genitals, Arax devised the system of covering with a thin layer of gouache in the shape of a false fig leaf the virile attributes of the model, which disappeared easily with a little water once in the hands of the buyer.
Although all physical photographers had to deal during the fifties, sixties and seventies, with the harassment and strict application of the vague laws of “obscenity”, and the difficulties of the Church, which did not look favorably on the phenomenon that he called immoral, this was a very productive, very rewarding and above all very profitable period in their careers and in their economies, and all despite the fact that it was regulated and hampered by authoritarian regimes, particularly in Italy with fascism, where production of the male nude ceased almost entirely until the late 1970s.
Paradoxically, a reflection of this cultural tradition could be traced in the art of totalitarian regimes, which considered the “exaltation of the body” proposed by the Movement for Physical Culture to be convenient for their own purposes. This is explained because sometimes a homoerotic sensitivity can be found in official photographic images produced by fascism or even by Nazism as it was in the film Olympiaby film director Leni Riefenstahl, considered a masterpiece even though it was expressly commissioned by the Nazi regime.
But if all these years were very prosperous for Arax, they were also quite tumultuous when a group of photographers like him brought to life that phenomenon called photo. beefcake. This word immediately conjures up the image of a young man flaunting his physique, but has actually been used as a blanket term for a genre of photography that is as American as jazz music and yet was actively repressed by the Bureau itself. United States Post Office and censored by law enforcement officials, who believed that the nude male form was inherently pornographic. In the early 1970s, ARAX was so fed up with these persecutions that he went so far as to say: “Comparing my photography to pornography is like comparing classical music to rock and roll.”
In 1978, the American magazine Grecian Guild Pictorial won a lawsuit in the United States Supreme Court, which eventually recognized male nude photographs as a legitimate form of artistic expression.
In 1973, the NABBA Bodybuilding Federation, through its mythical president Oscar Heidenstam, honored Arax for his 25 years at the service of the aforementioned federation, and in recognition of his status as Official Photographer of the Mr. Universe contest, he awarded an honorary medal and trophy, these recognitions that were added to the many already received in his long career, in which he highlighted, the Gold Medal of Honor for Physical Education and Sports awarded by the “Ministry of National Education of France ”for his dedication and commitment to sport in the Republic. On June 27, 1975, Gregor Arax died in Paris, being buried in the Bagneux Cemetery, leaving an extraordinary legacy that will be remembered as one of the most outstanding photographers of the 20th century.
– .
