Born in one of the oldest neighborhoods of Tbilisi, Vartanov was enamored with art, photography and cinema from an early age, but his attempts to become a cinematographer failed. Instead, he landed a job as a stills photographer at the Georgia Film studios and worked there from 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The photos of Vigen Vartanov can be compared to cinematography in the impact they have on the viewer.
In tandem with his professional responsibilities at Georgia Film, Vartanov actively pursued his independent photographic experiments, which were evidently influenced both by his cinematic milieu and the late-modernist works of Czechoslovak and Polish photographers that Vartanov would have seen on the pages of imported Eastern-European magazines such as Projektand Fotografia. Shooting mostly in black and white, Vartanov turned his lens on practically all subjects that exuded a certain melancholic poetry – from old interiors and Tbilisi’s historical streets to found-object still lives and portraits of adolescent women.
His photos are an open portal to unexplored surrealistic realities, like a kingdom of dreams, they evoke multi-layered, black-and-white worlds filled with mystical codes and meanings. His creative work fell outside the rigid Soviet system of “socialist realism,” the only artistic style accepted during most years of his lifetime.
Knowing this, during his career which spans 60 years, Vartanov never published those images. Finally, several years after the death of the artist, the Vartanov family has returned to the negatives, printing and restoring his visions, almost a half-century after their creation.
These silver gelatin prints are printed by Vigen Vartanov Jr. a master print maker based in Tbilisi, whose mission is to share his father’s legacy.
