1915 is an exploration of memory, displacement, and the enduring ties between people and place.
Centered on three survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the project follows their recollections of the homes they were forced to leave behind nearly a century earlier.
Blending portraiture, landscape photography, and film, I retraced their journeys through Turkey to photograph the villages they had fled, reuniting each survivor with their homeland.
Holding a cane in his right hand, Movses Haneshyan, 105, slowly approaches a life-size landscape.
He pauses, looks at the image, and begins to sing:
“My home... My Armenia.”
In 1915, the Ottoman Empire initiated a campaign of deportations, mass murder, and rape aimed at destroying the Armenian presence within its borders. By the end of the genocide, more than a million Armenians from what is now modern-day Turkey had been killed or driven from their ancestral homes.
One of the first genocides of the twentieth century,
it remains a defining rupture in Armenian history and collective memory.
Movses and his father survived.
One hundred years after fleeing his birthplace, Movses caresses its image, as if holding it close might carry him back to the place he called home so many years ago.
1915 reflects on the persistence of memory and the legacy of exile.
It is a story of home: everything they had, everything they lost, and what they have found again.
Commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution.
2015
Yepraksia Gevorgyan, 108, escaped by crossing the river to what is now present-day Armenia.
She watched the Ottomans kill the Armenians, throwing the bodies into the river.
“I remember the water. It was red, full of blood.”
Movses Haneshyan, 105, remembers when soldiers entered his village,
“I was with my father, holding his hand. Half the road was covered with dead people,”
he recalled.
When I told him, I would be traveling to his homeland, he gave me a hand-drawn map.
He described: the sea, the tree with the fruit he remembered eating and the church he remembered visiting.
“When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant. To a whole race; they understood this well, and these conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”
-Henry Morgenthau, US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
Mariam Sahakyan, 101, was born in Sason, Turkey, which became a major site of massacre in 1915.
She escaped to Syria with her mother and older brother, whom they dressed as a girl for safety.
The town, once populated predominately by Armenians, is now inhabited by a handful of hidden Armenians.
Mariam sits in front of a panel of an unpaved street in her hometown. She recalls hiding in the grass and walking at night for three days to flee the soldiers.
“All of them in rags and many of them naked... emaciated, sick, diseased, filthy, covered with dirt and vermin, driven along for many weeks like herds of cattle with very little to eat.”
- Leslie A Davis, Constantinople, 1915
When I told the survivors I was going to visit their former homes in Turkey, each asked me to fulfill a wish.
Movses, from Musa Dagh, wanted me to find his church and leave his image among what remained of its ruins. Yepraksia, from Kars, asked me to search for her older brother, from whom she had been separated in the aftermath of the genocide. Mariam, from Sason, asked me to bring back a handful of Turkish soil for her to be buried with.
I never found Yepraksia’s brother. But I returned with a story for Movses and a container of earth for Mariam.
When Mariam opened it, she reached for the soil, touched it gently, and thanked me.
“You’ve brought the smell of my village to me.”
