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On a trip to Armenia in 1995, attorney Matthew
Karanian was riding in a van loaded with tourists when he spotted a
group of migrant shepherds around a campfire. "Stop! Stop! I have to get
out," he shouted to the driver. Slogging
through the mud and sheep dung, Karanian was about to take a photograph
of the shepherds when he noticed another man taking pictures of them as
well.
"Who are you?" Karanian asked.
"I'm Bob Kurkjian," replied the stranger who would
soon become one of his closest friends and, eventually, his partner in
Stone Garden Productions, a two-man operation that markets photographs,
posters and books on Armenia.
Robert Kurkjian was an environmental scientist
from New Jersey teaching at the American University in Armenia. He spent
the years 1995 to 1999 traveling around Armenia in a surplus Russian
military jeep collecting water samples for his Ph.D. thesis on metal
contamination in Armenian waters. He was also taking thousands of
photographs at the same time.
Matthew Karanian, an attorney from Connecticut,
had just arrived in Armenia to help establish a network of
non-governmental organizations in a newly independent nation where,
until 1991, virtually everything has been controlled by the Russian
government.
What both men discovered in Armenia was a beauty
they had never expected-- a land of ancient stone churches, fields of
flowers, flocks of sheep, rugged snow-capped mountains and hardy,
resourceful people. "I fell in love with it," says Karanian. "It was
fantastic. The pictures I had seen of Armenia were all from the Soviet
era, or they were pictures of the earthquake of 1988 or the genocide of
1915. I expected it to be gray and bleak, but wow, it was not what I
expected. It was forlornly beautiful."
The two Americans teamed up to explore their
ancestral homeland and shot thousands of colorful images of the Armenian
people and landscape-- thousand year-old monasteries, the ancient
foothills of Mount Ararat, children riding on donkeys, shepherds tending
their flocks, the character of a proud people etched on the faces of
peasants and expressed in the hands of a shepherd grasping his staff.
"That's a book shot," Robert would joke of a
photograph Matthew had just taken. "That's a poster shot," Matthew would
say of one of Robert's photographs. It became a running joke with the
two men that they were working on a book, but it was also a dream, a
dream that became a reality in 1999.
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