Project Save: 25,000 and Counting

With Vartouhy Kojayan, Maral Voskian and Ruth Thomasian

I have in my possession only one photograph of my grandfather, Artin Gulvartian of Hajin. It may well be the only photograph he ever posed for in his lifetime, in this case, with his extended family including his wife Teshgouhi (nee Saghdasarian) and his two sons, my father (Asadour) and his younger brother (Antranig). My father is barely a year or year and a half old in the picture, and my grandfather no more 26 or 28. He died a few years later during the Genocide from an untreated burst appendix on an ox-driven cart as the family was evacuating Hajin in hopes of reaching Adana and eventual salvation. My father used to tell me that he never forgot the screaming of his dying father during a harrowing journey through mountain passes. He used to recall how he got up one morning and his father was not there screaming anymore.

It is a spine chilling experience to be staring straight at this photograph. It is not my father in the picture who overwhelms me, but rather my grandfather whose eyes lock into mine and I can’t bear to look at it anymore. I can feel him move and breathe in the picture as if he was alive. His eyes talk, as all Armenian eyes do!

I once cried with the picture in hand, unable to bear the thought of the untimely death of a loved Hajintzi – my grandfather, my beloved father’s father. The photograph is a picture of a good man. It is honest, clear, expressive and talkative. It is the beginning of my Armenian identity.

There is an organization in this world that collects priceless Armenian photographs such as my grandfather’s and preserves them for the Armenian culture and heritage. It is Project Save, located in Watertown, Mass. I may not get to see the thousands of photographs in their archives during my lifetime, but it gives me great comfort to know that they are in good hands, for others to see and feel. The pictures are safe with Project Save.

Project Save was founded by Ruth Thomasian. I recently met her at a presentation of the Project’s work. She came across as someone with an acute sense of mission and responsibility, who greatly enjoyed the story-telling element of her work. I was told that it all started in 1975, when as a costume designer in New York City, she was asked to design a costume for an Armenian play. A request, which she placed in an Armenian newspaper, resulted in one picture in the mail. She has not stopped looking, asking or collecting ever since. At first, it was slow coming, she said– maybe 50 donors for the entire first 4 years, but she now receives 1000 photos a year. A mosaic of thousand points of light of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Iraq, Soviet Armenia and America captured while at work or play, in weddings, playing music or on stage. Armenian women, men in the military, and lots of pictures of families – people with beautiful Armenian eyes staring straight at you and me. Many of these pictures were taken so they can be sent to a loved one who is absent from the picture, away in a far land toiling so he can feed the family back home – Some never made it! The archives narrate the story of Armenians wandering between home and homeland. Bantookh hayoo jagadakeer.

My meeting with Thomasian (photo) happened at a time when I had just finished six months of work sorting, cataloguing and albuming more than 5000 family photographs.

My father was an ardent photographer – taking pictures of everyone who visited our home, and of places we visited as a family. One of his best is a close-up of himself in black and white, shot in Berlin with an Agfa camera, 50 years before his teenage grandchildren discovered the joy of doing the same with their digital cameras.

The venture started as a plan I thought would be completed in a few weeks. It was initially intended as a photo album of 200 “All time favorite photographs”, gathered from files, and envelopes piled up in drawers around the house. I soon found out that there were many more pictures that were as good and eye-catching to overlook. I ended up going back to collections of photographs from my childhood and a compilation of pictures from the day I was christened (age 1 month), to the day I first started school (age 3). That album is uneventfully labeled “The black and white years”. Followed by another one called “The school years” (age 4-18), and then “The Philadelphia years” (age 18-25). “The year 2009” is in progress. I have been shooting pictures feverishly to feed my albums.

It was in Philadelphia, perhaps in the early 80’s that I went to my first Hye Kef Night held in the church hall in Wynnewood. I was told beforehand that it was Philadelphia’s best Armenian band that was playing that night- The Vosbikian Band, descendants of Armenian immigrants from Turkey. They were already into their third or fourth face change. One of those grandfather- to son- to grandson affairs. The Turkish music they were playing that night was in their minds convincingly Armenian, because it was, after all, the music they had learned from their grandfather- The one in the family who first came to America from a place where he was not welcome as an Armenian.

The Vosbikian Band is featured beautifully in Project Save’s 2006 published collection. Looking at their stylish photograph in dapper suits brought memories of Kef Nights in Philadelphia. I can even remember the sound of their songs to the accompaniment of the oud, dumbeg and clarinet (none of which is Armenian): a mish-mesh of lasting memories of my first months “just off the boat”. A crowd of 150 danced “tamzara” that night. It was dizzying.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of photography- the power to unravel memories, always sweet, because we never take pictures of things or events we do not like or enjoy. Do we? No!

At Project Save’s Watertown headquarters, I’m told, there’s 25,000 of them. At least one is bound to touch you and enrich your life. It may even be a picture of one of your ancestors, and you didn’t even know it existed.

Collecting is the highest form of civility, but collecting the most valuable and personal possession of others is something next to godliness.