Start Making Sense:
Archives as a Salve

Words by Arto Vaun

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It’s 1912. A group of tailors are busy at the Kondazian Coat Factory in Boston. There’s a hum of voices in English and Armenian mixing with the buzz of the sewing machines. The chilled February light seeps through the hazy windows. As the voices die down, the photographer asks them to look at the camera and be still for a moment. It gets quiet except for the creaking of a chair or two as the workers awkwardly settle. Then they look at the camera. And now they are looking at me.

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Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives was founded by someone who had been instinctively collecting since she was little, taking photos and keeping journals. In the late 1960s, Ruth Thomasian was living in New York City, working as a seamstress on Broadway. One day, a local Armenian organization reached out to her to do the costumes for a play they were putting on. Not knowing much about traditional Armenian costumes, Ruth looked for photographs that would help her with the designs. What she found instead was a singular obsession for photographs and the stories they tell. After some years of meeting with donors and collecting their photos and oral histories, Project SAVE was officially launched in 1975. With well over 75,000 hardcopy photographs that reflect the global Armenian experience, it is now the oldest and most valuable such archive.

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When I initially gaze back at the workers at the Kondazian Coat Factory, it is at a remove. I don’t know who they are or how they’ve come to find themselves in that moment. And that’s exactly why I’m moved not only by this photo but by most of the collections in the archives—the anonymity and mystery are beguiling. Although the historical context is certainly vital to what an archive does, the energy, impact, and beauty of the photographs often have an immediate power of their own. When strangers in a photo from over 100 years ago make eye contact with you, it’s strange and familiar at once—the very definition of Freud’s concept of the uncanny.

My parents were new immigrants to Boston in the 1960s. They met and married in the 1970s, and the apartment where I was born was located near the new Kondazian Coat Factory building. So, then, what is it that’s contained in this gaze between that photo and me? I see blue-collar women and men, mostly immigrants, just before the start of World War I and the calamity of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. I see people in the process of becoming. Becoming American. Becoming traumatized by the events about to befall their loved ones in a few short years. Becoming both rooted in the United States and haunted by a mix of nostalgia and anguish over an ever-receding past and “homeland.”

A single photo turns into a thread connecting otherwise disparate stories and people over 100 year apart. It becomes a salve over the cuts and scars brought on by the jagged realities of diasporic life.

In order to activate this salve, Project SAVE will hold two artist and researcher residencies per year. This new initiative is part of an effort to unlock the vast potential of such an archive. Different types of artists, writers, and researchers will spend time in the collections and then produce an original work. This is one of Project SAVE’s new initiatives to reposition itself as an outward-looking archive that transcends ethnicity.

Photographs are a major part of the current socio-cultural language globally, from Instagram to movies to graphic design. So, although Project SAVE’s focus has been on the Armenian experience, these photographs are actually images of people like any other around the world, creating and partaking in the fabric of wherever they may be. Like the Nshkian family in Fresno, who forwent the dominant farming industry to instead open a cyclery. But not just a cyclery; they also started selling phonographs. There they are, in 1910, among the relatively new technological offerings of their store,  looking into the camera—itself still in its adolescence as a technology.

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A photography archive should be a living archive because photographs are visual pieces of modernity, whose big bang occurred with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. With each intense propulsion of new technologies and ideologies eversince, life has become more and more fragmented to the point where time, memory, and facts get blurrier and blurrier. Photographs thus become one of the most grounding forces in such an atomizing era. They are vibrant evidence that modernity is ongoing, unfinished, and that we are all within its expansive matrix. Photographs allow us to pause and peer into the intricate and ceaseless mystery that is the intersection between the past and present, where the future heads toward the dark or toward the light.

Whether it's a group of musicians and friends in 1912 in the Ottoman Empire,

a small group in Racine, Wisconsin, gathered to consecrate the ground of a new Armenian church in 1974,

two women at an outdoor market in the fledgling and short-lived first Armenian Republic in 1919,

or a bakery in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1952,

the people in this immense archive may not be living, but the wide band of historical events, everyday decisions, dreams, and humanity are very much alive, not just in the photos but in all of us.

Arto Vaun is the Executive Director of Project SAVE Photograph Archives. He's also a musician and poet. For a decade, he taught creative writing and modern literature at universities overseas and in Boston.

Founded in 1975, Project SAVE Photograph Archives is the oldest and largest archive solely focused on photographs of the global Armenian experience. Visit us at projectsave.org.