Fire eyes
Nowhere better than in Antoine Agoudjian’s images do we sense the ambiguity of a familiar term, which can be so deceiving. Not one of his photographs fails to show, with beauty and justice, the efficacy of a long-term irruption, tender or brutal, at the heart of a specific moment. Or rather, in each case, the strength of each image comes from the meeting of the immediacy of the scene he has shot with the long-term situation of which it speaks so loudly. It is indeed the source of an unequalled seduction.
This fragile and knowledgeable equilibrium could perhaps be considered to be embodied, metaphorically, by the person in traditional costume who is balanced on the high-wire in front of the immutable church in the background.
The artist doesn't try to hide his obstinate search for memory; he refuses to show any gratuitousness in the images. The impact of the Armenian martyrdom is engrossing, in the omnipresence of mourning between the barbarity of men and the violence of the quaking earth. The palette of flattened blacks, sudden spots of white, greys, and the mastery of shading—all this gives full intensity to the humanity of faces marked by trials which have furrowed the old and brought the ingenuousness of the young to the fore.
No trace here of didacticism; but the rare talent of offering our eyes and minds the indelible trace of a tortured past—a past which nevertheless opens a path toward a peace dreamed of in the fields, the ocean and the pavement. Thus these people, martyred by History, come to us according to the artist’s intention. Without hiding anything, he has chosen to illuminate us and thus speak to us of what things the future will perhaps preserve from the fatalities of perpetual suffering. And we are grateful to him for that light.
TEXT BY JEAN-NOËL JEANNENEY
©picture Antoine Agoudjian, Sevkiyat , Armenia, city of Yerevan. 1st commemoration of the massacres in Sumgait. Picture taken in 1989