WINSLOW MARTIN: MY ARMENIA

“I asked him to become invisible,” Martin recalls. “To just go about his life and ignore me. A fly on the wall.”

Father Dajad allowed himself to be followed without interruption, moving through his days with restless purpose. Through the life of one man, Martin encountered a broader world, one grounded in history, memory and continuity.

A year later, he arrived in Armenia. He came without expectation, but what unfolded before him was something deeper than unfamiliarity. It was a recognition. The country was still carrying the physical and emotional aftermath of immense upheaval. Armenia had emerged only a few years earlier from the first war over Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), a predominantly Armenian enclave within modern-day Azerbaijan that had become central to Armenia’s modern identity and struggle for survival.

At the same time, the devastating 1988 earthquake remained deeply present in daily life. Entire communities were still rebuilding amid economic collapse, energy shortages and the lingering disorientation that followed the end of the Soviet Union. Martin’s eye found the quiet intersections of this struggle; in one frame, a girl stands holding a flower before a tank memorial in Artsakh, a stark composition capturing how deeply war and memory already coexisted within the landscape.

The Armenia Martin encountered still carried the visual language of a post-Soviet republic finding its footing after independence. Yerevan, the capital city, moved between exhaustion and reinvention. Gray Soviet monuments lingered awkwardly beside ancient, weathered churches, a visual tension that repeatedly drew Martin’s eye. In Etchmiadzin, the spiritual center of the Armenian Apostolic Church, priests moved through dim corridors beneath centuries of ritual, while outside, the country wrestled with the uncertainties of its modern identity.

Through Father Dajad, Martin entered spaces few outsiders would normally witness—from crowded family gatherings to long meals filled with argument, humor and endless toasts. Ararat, the sacred mountain that remains visible yet unreachable beyond the closed border, stood constantly in the distance, less like scenery than inheritance. Curiosity gave way to attachment. “Where the guest is God,” Martin says, “but it felt more like being treated as family.”

For many Armenians, that instinct toward hospitality is more than generosity. It is a form of cultural endurance—an affirmation of tradition, presence and survival carried through human connection. That quality resists easy description, yet remains unmistakable—an openness formed into daily life. Martin returned, then returned again.

“For a long time, when people asked me, “Why Armenia?’ I would just say, ‘Because of the people.’”

Over time, Armenia became part of his life—shaped by familiarity, accumulated experience and access built slowly over years. His camera moved within daily life, capturing a quiet, enduring faith revealed through the small, unannounced moments of existence.

In the years that followed, Martin’s connection to Armenia gradually widened. Villages led to friendships, and trust opened doors that could never have been reached through assignment or credentials. He learned to move patiently, allowing situations to unfold rather than forcing images into existence. The camera gradually became part of the trust that allowed him to move within people’s lives.

He wandered through remote towns, crowded apartments and long evenings where conversation drifted between poetry, politics, history and humor. In many homes, photography gradually gave way to something more human: shared meals, endless coffee and the feeling that he was no longer being received as a visitor. “People would thank me for caring about Armenia,” he recalls. “Especially because I wasn’t Armenian.”

That trust shaped the photographs. Martin was drawn to gesture, atmosphere and emotional rhythm, often finding meaning in moments that initially appeared ordinary: children playing in half-abandoned courtyards, families gathered beneath fading Soviet wallpaper, or quiet figures sitting beneath portraits and icons. His images accumulated slowly, through closeness and repetition, creating a sustained portrait of Armenian life.

That initial immersion, which had largely revolved around the quiet sanctuary of Etchmiadzin, was violently interrupted in October of 1999 during Martin’s second visit to Armenia. While he was photographing the election of a new Catholicos, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church within the holy precincts, gunmen miles away in Yerevan stormed the Armenian Parliament, assassinating Armenia’s prime minister, the speaker of parliament and six other officials in an attack that shocked the young republic. What he witnessed marked a shift. Armenia was no longer simply a place of observation. It became part of a lived reality marked by deep fracture. The weight of that moment stayed with him and drew him back repeatedly, pulling him deeper into the rhythms and complexities of daily Armenian existence.

As the years passed, the country evolved. Tradition remained, but the pressures of modernization altered its surface. Beneath it, something quieter emerged—an uncertainty difficult to name. Martin’s work does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. It acknowledges them. In 2020, that tension became immediate as a second war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Artsakh. “This changed my trip,” he says. “And then my life.”

From that point forward, Martin was no longer simply documenting Armenia’s culture and people. He had become a witness to a nation confronting conflict and displacement in real time. Martin moved closer—to hospitals, to homes, to families facing daunting circumstances. His lens documented this grief through intimate moments of physical labor and personal loss: a striking image of a volunteer digging graves by hand at Yerablur Military Cemetery during the early days of the war, preparing burial sites for soldiers whose bodies had not yet arrived. Elsewhere, Martin found himself in rooms where parents had just learned that a son had been killed, and in homes where silence settled over family snapshots spread across a table like fragments of a shattered world. “I remember thinking, if that were my son, my life would be ruined,” he says. “I cried that night.”

For those familiar with Armenia’s history, and the lingering weight of genocide and generational trauma, such moments do not exist in isolation. They echo across generations, linking present grief to a longer historical arc that is rarely spoken aloud, yet deeply understood. Contemporary life remains inseparable from this legacy, captured vividly in Martin’s 2019 photograph of the annual torchlight march winding toward the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, a sea of fire illuminating the night. By 2023, the sense of devastation had intensified. At Kornidzor, Martin witnessed displacement on a scale that defied comprehension as Artsakh collapsed.

The region had been inhabited by Armenians for centuries and remained central to Armenian cultural, religious and historical identity. Monasteries, villages and family histories stretched across its mountains long before modern borders were drawn. The fall of the region in 2023 and the displacement of more than 100,000 Armenians from their ancestral homeland carried political consequences as well as the rupture of a living connection rooted in memory, place and belonging.

Families moved through the limbo of arrival—some open, others withdrawn. Some accepted help, others sat quietly in visible shock. The atmosphere lingered between departure and an unknown future. One photograph holds this moment: three Armenian volunteers standing together, looking toward the mountains beyond the border. “I didn’t fully understand it at the time,” Martin says. “Only later did I see what it held.”

To stand before those mountains is to face something that cannot be returned to. For Armenians, this gesture carries a deeper resonance—one shaped by sacrifice, dispossession and repeated displacement across generations. The image does not attempt to explain this. It simply holds it. “My photos are not images,” Martin says. “They’re memory fields.”

He does not claim authority over what he captures. Instead, he works through proximity and trust, aware of the limits of his position. Over the years, access was earned through relationships built gradually over time. In moments where he questioned whether he should keep lifting the camera, it was often the people themselves who encouraged him to continue. They understood the importance of being seen, and of being remembered—not only in print, but in the recognition of what has been endured and what they continue to build despite enormous loss.

Martin continues to photograph moments of fragile continuity: refugees attending church, standing together beneath rituals that had survived war and exile. Nearby, children still play beside temporary shelters. These quieter scenes do not erase the surrounding trauma, but through flashes of unexpected laughter surfacing amid exhaustion and uncertainty, they reveal something equally essential: the persistence of ordinary life even in the shadow of displacement.

Gradually, Martin’s photographs have come to serve another purpose beyond personal witness. Through ongoing exhibitions, presentations and publications, he introduces Armenia to audiences unfamiliar with its history, culture and continuing struggles. What moved many Armenians was not simply the images themselves, but the persistence behind them—a non-Armenian photographer returning repeatedly across decades to document a country much of the outside world barely understood.

For Martin, the work remains inseparable from a larger sense of responsibility: building cultural connections through attention, presence and remembrance. The photographs serve as both personal archive and public testimony, preserving evidence of suffering and resilience alike. “I’ve chosen this,” he says. “It matters to me.”

Nearly three decades after Martin’s first visit, the relationship endures. He keeps coming back. The work remains open—still unfolding alongside the lives it continues to witness.

ADDENDUM

See more of this photographer’s work at winslowmartin.com and instagram.com/winmartin.