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Schoolwork
In the spring of 2023, I went for the first time to a flea market located behind the Hrazdan Stadium in Yerevan, Armenia. I wandered aimlessly between the rows of old junk, looking at junk and taking rare shots. It was already warming up and the wind was picking up city dust from the ground. In a distant corner, with rugs hanging, I noticed boxes of slides and approached the vendor. I asked him - what's on the slides? He replied that some family archive, he didn't know them. I opened the box and took out the first slide, raised it to the sky and saw a boy in a dark room lit by beautiful daylight, I was mesmerized by this shot. I looked at the boxes, there were about twenty of them, looked at the shot again, randomly pulled out another one, looked and asked how much they cost. It turned out that the seller was selling the slides piece by piece for some pennies. How many more slides like that could end up in boxes? I didn't want to break them up, I felt sick at the thought that the archive would be ruined by being sold one slide at a time. I needed to think, so I walked around the market for another ten minutes. I didn't want to take pictures anymore, my thoughts were filled with a shot of a boy at a table writing his schoolwork in a notebook... and then I realized that film photography is a disease, I'm sick and I can't go home without this picture. I went back and bought the whole archive, I didn't have much money at the time, I spent the last of it, but I never doubted for a minute that I wanted to buy all the slides. When I got home I spent several hours going through the archive thinking about the fate of this Armenian family. They traveled often, as evidenced by several signed boxes. GDR, Greece, Egypt, Berlin, St. Petersburg. These pictures are from the Soviet Union, Armenia was part of the USSR at that time. Germany was divided into two parts, so these photos were taken before the unification of GDR and FRG, in 1990. In the same year Armenia gained independence. Before 1990, traveling outside the USSR was possible only for a narrow circle of people, officials, diplomats and their relatives. The author of the photos sometimes appears in the frame, a gray-haired man of 50-58 years old, he was lucky to be able to afford such trips for himself and his family in those strict times, when the mere desire to go abroad could be regarded as treason against the motherland. Then it occurred to me that I would like to find his relatives, perhaps the boy from this frame, and give them the whole archive. I've been putting off going to the lab to scan the slides for a long time, and I move around a lot when I'm in exile. Recently I traveled to Armenia and took one box of slides with me. The whole archive is kept in Armenia at my nephew's place, but I live in Georgia. Back in Tbilisi I scanned 36 slides and I am sharing this find with you. First of all, I hope to find my relatives in this way to give them the whole archive. Let this album be in the public domain until they are found.
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