You could say I was destined to become a photographer. Uncle
Varouj believes that being an Armenian photographer in
Lebanon is the most natural thing in the world, as natural as the
cedar tree on the flag. ‘Armenians are photography, just as the
cedar tree is Lebanon!’ he says. He taught me to trust my
instincts and look at the world as a series of clicks. ‘Aim and
shoot, Koko, let your eyes do the work.’
I was born in the Armenian suburb of Bourj Hammoud,
north of Beirut, in 1948. I dropped out of school at the age of
twelve. Schools at that time were poorly funded, badly equipped,
housed in tin-roofed shacks and designed to incarcerate the
maximum number of street urchins. Those who managed to
obtain a genuine education were the ones with devoted parents
waiting for them at home to mend the damage done by the
school. Unfortunately, mine had died before I started kindergarten.
After school the kids were picked up by their parents, all
except Koko. Brothers and sisters held hands and went home
singing or quarrelling. I walked home alone, except for the
times when a tomboy called Arsiné, who lived down the road
from us, would suddenly grip my hand as if she were capturing
it for keeps.
The insult that followed the injury of my parents’ death took
the form of a teacher armed with a wooden ruler. His intoxication
with the clap of that ruler against our soft skin
dwarfed his meagre teaching skills. I endured him until I
mustered enough resolve to drop out altogether, and went to
help my uncle in his Photoshop.
I learned my trade through trial and error. The minute my lens is focused, a new chemistry begins to stir. I’m not sure
how or why, but I get signals, like Morse code. Faces, places,
incidents, accidents, ugliness and beauty – all are engaged in a
dialogue with time, light, and the perfect frame. Unlike the
naked eye, what the lens captures is stilled forever. The naked
eye is subject to emotions, to partiality, to its own selectiveness,
which is prone to distortion and possibly to oblivion. But
a well-clicked photo is a witness to one particular, unique
moment.
I once read that a famous English poet believed photography
brought a new sadness to the world. Perhaps because photos
have their limitations. There’s an element of finality sealing
them; their immunity to change is a cold answer to the eye’s
hunger for more meat, more life. Or perhaps he didn’t look
that good in photos. But I’ve noticed that browsing through
old sepias and black and whites from my uncle’s albums gives
me a sensation akin to apparition: Armenians in their coarse
attire, their thick moustaches, their deep eyes, sitting with their
head-scarved women and jumbled-up children, staring at the
lens – here we are, take us to immortality! If I look at them
long enough the carpet of time is drawn from under my feet. A
whole factory of memories and quasi memories goes into
motion. Time ferments the deposit of life in all of them. They
stop me in my tracks, draw me back years and continents to
look and see again.
In those albums is the history of a people who go back
thousands of years. Like Lebanon and Palestine, Armenia was
repeatedly occupied by large empires: Persian, Arab, Ottoman,
not to mention recurring attacks by hordes of Turkic and
Mongolian tribesmen. As a regional hot spot it was disputed,
raided, and invaded by ruthless armies. Diaspora became a
normal extension of Armenian history. After the First World
War thousand of Armenians were uprooted, mainly from
Anatolia. Over one million were killed. The dislocated sought refuge in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and other Levantine
countries.
My uncle’s albums include pictures taken during the exodus,
of families harbouring in barns and stables or sleeping in the
bush or on river banks. The determined and sometimes defiant
stare in the eyes of their children is identical to those I’ve seen
in the Palestinian refugee camps. There are also pictures of
weddings and christenings and school groups, among them a
few clicks from my early childhood.
But the one I love most is a snapshot of my parents that hung
on the living room wall above my sofa-bed. It was taken in
Beirut’s centre, a quick click by an Armenian street photographer
of a couple walking together arm in arm. The lady’s
coat is partly open and the gentleman’s free hand is comfortably
tucked in his pocket. My dad had been a jeweller and watchmaker.
He inherited his trade from his forefathers, who were
famous in Cilicia for their precision and honesty. My mum was
French educated. She came from a prominent Cilician family.
Her sophisticated hairdo and European clothes set her apart
from the rugged Armenian refugees I see in Uncle’s albums. I
often wondered how she coped, as a child, with the long journey
on foot by the Euphrates. I spent hours diving into their faces,
trying to imagine my life with them, how it would have been in
a different home, with brothers and sisters and birthdays and
parties. Trying to remember what I was like when I had them
and what they were like when they had me.
My recurring dreams of my parents derive from images of
other children with their parents. Seeing myself hugged and
kissed and given presents and pushed in a pram on a nice sunny
day are not necessarily my own memories. They are clicks by
my inner lens of a life that never was and never will be. Whenever
I asked Aunty Clauda about my parents, her eyes would
just go misty and she would brush my face gently with her
rough fingers. ‘It was an accident, Koko. A speeding car lost its brakes while they were crossing the Corniche.’ My uncle would
only say, ‘They were regular God-fearing Armenians, son, bless
their souls.’ Putting a firm lid on painful memories is a trait of
the Armenian Diaspora. The idea is to instil pride rather than
bitterness. At first it was a coping mechanism against their
traumatic genocide. Then it became part of their culture.
In 1965 Uncle Varouj had a minor stroke. He was getting on
a bit anyway and decided this was a good time for me to take
over his shop. But I was too young. I needed to be out. While
he was recovering, I spent my time wandering, clicking my days
away. One afternoon I went up on a roof and clicked an
aeroplane carrying the sunset on its back over Beirut’s concrete
jungle. It was good. I printed it, put it on the top of my best
shots and took it to the Daily Sun. Fathy Nawar, the feature
editor, gave it this prophetic caption: Memories of days to
come: the sun sets on freedom? It caught the eye of the boss and
landed me my job. I was seventeen. Receiving my first pay
cheque, with the boss shaking my hand, was an unforgettable
moment: ‘You are a real Armenian, Krikor; your pictures are
good to look at and they tell a story. That’s what we need.
Welcome to the Daily Sun.’
The boss assigned me to Emile Khoury, his ‘Field Marshal’, as
he called him. Considering the bickering and bitching that
plagues the click people, I was lucky that Emile took a shine to
me. ‘Capa, Koko!’ he exclaimed when he first saw me. I had no
idea then who Capa was, he whose best shots covered the wall
above Emile’s desk along with a portrait of the legend himself in
a Humphrey Bogart pose, cigarette at one corner of his lips.
Emile was right – I do bear some resemblance to the American
war photographer lionised by Hollywood: the same bridged
eyebrows, the same thick black hair (though mine is wavier)
and the same thin lips.
‘See this one?’ Emile laid a fraternal hand on my shoulder and
pointed at a picture of a Spanish Civil War rebel taken at the very moment he was shot: falling back, his rifle about to drop
from his hand, all alone in the middle of an empty space. ‘That’s
not the click of a passer-by or a tourist but an insider from the
belly of the beast. I could die for a shot like that,’ Emile sighed.
A coloured portrait of Casablanca’s heroine was pasted up near
Capa’s. ‘Look at her, Koko, just oozing sensuality. Ingrid fell in
love with him in Paris after the war.’ He slapped my shoulder:
‘Make it in the killing fields and the dames will die for you!’ he
rasped, in a poor imitation of Bogie’s gravelly voice.
It was my first day of work, and the first day of my new life.