Black Garden is a documentary photography project about the Nagorno-Karabakh region and the gradual disappearance of a territory and its Armenian population. The project began as a personal journey: born in France to Armenian parents, I travelled to Armenia in 2012 to reconnect with a family history and identity that had been passed down through silence.
From 2016 onwards, I began documenting Nagorno-Karabakh, first as a photographer and later with a camera. In 2019, I returned to the village of Talish, where I spent a month living alongside its inhabitants and met several people, including Samvel, Avo and Erik. Their stories embody the deep attachment of a population to its land, despite the constant threat of war.
The 2020 war, the blockade in 2022 and the mass exodus in 2023 definitively transformed the region. Over nearly a decade of work, the project evolved from a simple testimony into a work of remembrance: documenting the faces, places and traces of a world that is disappearing.
Black Garden ultimately seeks to tell this disappearance on a human scale, through individual stories and images that become records of a territory now emptied of its population. The project explores memory, exile and erasure, while questioning the role of photography in the face of the disappearance of a people and their history.
