Scout Tufankjian

Growing up, I was fascinated by my fellow Armenians.  I pored through books and newspapers, looking for glimpses of Armenian school kids in Kolkata, soccer players in Argentina, or dancers in Aleppo, and wondered: did our Armenian-ness connect us or had the different paths taken by our refugee grandparents separated us in some way? 

In 2009, I set out to try to answer these questions, beginning a journey that took me to over twenty different countries to photograph Armenian communities on six different continents and create a portrait of today's Armenian family – LA drag racers, Syrian refugees, Lebanese revolutionaries, Italian monks, Ethiopian jazz singers, Russian boxers, French singers, and Indian rugby players, presented here in the same way Armenian families around the world display pictures of their loves ones, crowding our mantles and overflowing from our shelves.  

And we were still one family, even after 100 years of exile.  Did the credit lie with the church and the language; the traditions and the food? Or was it something else? A man in France, said, “You know, when I meet an Armenian, it's like we have been friends forever...The connection is there right away due to our ancestors and history.”

And he was exactly right.  Until then, I had been thinking of 100 years as being a long time, but we had lived our lives together for over four thousand years. Compared to that, 100 years was nothing. The trees that we had planted were still alive.  The grooves in Kharpert's hillside that once held our homes stood in testament to the thousands of Armenians, who once called that city—now a tiny village—home.

Of course, we were still one people; one vast extended family. Those ties are impossible to erase in a mere 100 years, no matter how far we have been scattered across the globe.

-There is Only the Earth: Scout Tufankjian