Whether portraying the age-old world of New England fishermen in his “Gloucester” series, crafting wonderfully revealing portraits of celebrities like Colin Powell or depicting sensitive olive tree stalks in Yalova, Turkey, Nubar Alexanian’s photographs are at once fragile and tough – a soft and serene interplay of light and shadow that is the rarest of pleasures. 
 

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Alexanian attended Boston University before becoming one of the nation’s finest documentary photographers. His work has appeared in leading publications around the globe, including Life Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, GEO, Fortune and many others. He has held solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Burden Gallery and the Walker Art Center, among others. 

Nubar currently makes his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts with his wife Rebecca. Their daughter Abby lives close by in Waltham, where she attends graduate school at the Heller School of Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Nubar’s greatest passion outside family and work is fly-fishing — perhaps a relaxing break from the intensity that he has always invested in other parts of his life.

Simple questions and scars of silence

Like so many Armenian families, the Alexanians never discussed the Armenian Genocide. “My grandparents never discussed it with my parents, my parents never discussed it with me and I never discussed it with my daughter,” says Nubar. 

But all this changed one day in October of 2011 when his daughter Abby, half Armenian on her dad’s side, asked a simple question: “Dad, will you come with me to Armenia?”

“Scars of Silence” is the result of that question. For some five years now, Nubar and Abby have been producing a feature-length documentary film currently titled “Scars of Silence: Three Generations from the Armenian Genocide,” scheduled for release in December 2016.

Four Turkish villagers meet in US

The geography of Nubar’s family is fascinating in and of itself, as each one of his four grandparents hailed from a different village in Turkey.

Nubar’s maternal grandmother Vartui Serabian Antranigian was born and raised in one of the four Armenian villages of Yalova, Turkey, located near Constantinople. She married at the age of 12 into a baker’s family and had three daughters. In 1917 she witnessed the massacre of most of her family members: the only survivors were her younger brother and three daughters, who were secretly taken in by a kind Turkish neighbour for one night. The following day they were forced on a death march of more than 400 miles from Yalova to Aleppo, Syria. Subjected to terrible hardships and brutality, Vartui lost track of her brother along the way and was tragically forced to leave her ailing daughters by the side of the road to die. She was 18 years old.

Eventually, Vartui made it to Aleppo. Nubar supposes that she must have been wearing a baker’s uniform of some kind, because as she marched through town in a long line of women destined to die, a Turkish doctor approached her and asked if she could cook. 

She became the family’s cook for two years, and in 1919 this same Turkish doctor paid for her passage to United States. He also gave her a silk carpet to sell, so that she would have some money. 

Touchingly, he told her she could come back at any time and gave her a small piece of paper with all the information she would need to locate him. She finally made her way to Worcester, Massachusetts, which had a large Armenian immigrant community at the time, as part of a marriage arrangement with Alexanian’s grandfather Bedros.

Nubar’s maternal grandfather Bedros Torosian, born in 1887, grew up in a German orphanage near Tadem in the Kharberd Region of historic Armenia. “Torosian lived in a German orphanage until the age of 15 and was trained as a carpenter,” Nubar explains. He managed to escape the old country and make it to France and then Argentina before eventually arriving in Wocester, Massachusetts, in 1916. 

Bedros and Vartui married in Massachusetts and had three children: Nubar, Alice and Rose Torosian. Unfortunately, Vartui passed away when Nubar was just three years old, so he never had a change to discuss her experiences of the Armenian Genocide with her. 

Nubar’s paternal grandfather Parsegh Alexanian was born in 1881 in Shentil, also in the Kharberd Region, and came to America in 1898 at the age of 17. His paternal grandmother Varter (Rose) Goshdigian fled the Hamidian Massacres of 1896 at the age of 20. In the course of making their documentary, Nubar and Abby visited her village of Husseinig and found the parcel of land where she grew up. “In the film, I return three years later and try to purchase her land as a reparative act of rebellion: to make it Armenian again,” says Nubar.

Through a lens, thankfully 

Strangely enough, in an age of “returning to one’s roots” Nubar was not interested in exploring them until his daughter asked her simple, fateful question. “As a photojournalist, I’ve travelled to more than 30 countries, but never wanted to visit Armenia. I always felt adamantly that I was American,” he says. “I grew up in a totally Armenian family, a totally Armenian culture – my first language was Armenian…but I knew nothing about being Armenian.”

Although Nubar already has five books of photography in print, he believes that “Scars of Silence” will be his greatest achievement. And as this five-year labor of love comes to fruition, Nubar also takes time to thank those who helped his family survive many years ago: “I am extremely grateful to the Turkish doctor who saved my grandmother and to the German missionaries who raised my grandfather in an orphanage and gave him a craft and a future.”

The story is verified by the 100 LIVES Research Team.