The story of Arsineh Valladian

Arsineh Valladian has spent her life with photography as a way of witnessing and remembering, using her camera to trace the threads of identity, displacement, and belonging.

Her images move between quiet portraits and sweeping landscapes, always guided by an instinct to reveal what lingers beneath the surface of daily life. In her acclaimed book, My Nation: The Trails and Trials of an Armenian Repatriate, Valladian turns her lens outward, chronicling the struggles and resilience of returning to a homeland marked by both history and upheaval. Across decades of work, her photography has become less about capturing moments than about preserving truths—fragments of a nation’s story held in light and shadow.