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“In photography, a much greater importance should be given to the intellectual aspect of the work. Indeed, it should become the main artistic factor… creating the feelings we experience in the presence of a masterpiece.” 

Pierre Dubreuil 

Technological progress continues to push photography in directions until recently unfathomed. In an age of digital cameras and iPhones when almost anyone can take a “good” picture, how does the photographer create something original? And how does the medium progress as an art form?  

The answers are several and varied. For some the solution has come in taking pictures of hitherto taboo or transgressive subjects—an aesthetic politics of shock, as it were. One thinks of Sally Mann’s unposed shots of naked children, or Nan Goldin’s daring look into the lives of substance abusers. A generation or two before them, others already emphasized the grotesque (Anne Arbus), the violence of everyday urban life (Weegee), or else engaged in what the French term épater le bourgeois (Mapplethorpe’s whip exiting his own anus). 

Other photographers, whom one might term technologists, have taken different tacks. These artists work more on the photographic and development process. A good case in point—the Starn twins, who print on metallic paper then cut up the results and paste them back together again, sometimes in multiples, varying the size, shape and details of each creation. They have been quoted as saying that the degradation of their photographs over time constitutes part of the art work’s life itself. Or one thinks of Alexandra Hedison updating the centuries-old chemigram process that relies heavily on the haphazard vagaries of the development process.  

In the case of Canadian Armenian photographer Osheen Harruthoonyan, the answer lies in a third and beguiling way. Using a unique photographic development technique that plays with positive and negative images and inverts black and white like so many x-rays, Harruthoonyan’s work is at once classically beautiful yet unsettling, familiar yet uncanny. A seahorse from deep within the ocean and stars from the cosmos above glow with a decidedly otherworldly shimmer; elegant glove-clad women at a military base in West Bengal, India appear even more graceful than in real life; giant trees reminiscent of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s wondrous baobab planet jump out at the viewer; while landscapes near Armenia’s borderlands both noble and gloomy capture that land’s tormented history.

All these and more come to captivating life thanks to the artist’s gift for abstracting from the aesthetic worlds of objects both living and dead, and for evoking emotions and narratives that resonate deeply with viewers. As noted, to do so he deploys a set of proprietary tools and chemistry that carefully manipulate the film’s emulsion prior to being printed and which he tones in a traditional wet darkroom, onto fiber paper. His use of photographic layering, together with time and chance, imbue his images with an added sense of depth and meaning. The resulting photographs invite viewers on rich introspective journeys. Though still relatively young, Harruthoonyan has exhibited at institutions such as the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and the Louvre in Paris, and has been featured on Vice!, Bravo and CBC’s “Exhibitionists.” His work has drawn global attention from art enthusiasts and scholars alike and is included in public collections such as the Boston Public Library and that of renowned filmmaker Atom Egoyan.

Born into an Armenian family in Teheran, Iran and brought up mainly in Vancouver, Harruthoonyan today resides in New York City. And if photography has struggled with its identity as art vs. documentation almost since its inception, Harruthoonyan’s photographs work as both simultaneously. His true gift: to transform everyday objects, people and places into singular visions that both delight and fool the senses.  

When documenting the world as he sees it, the photographer also makes important statements about the often overlooked and intertwined relationship between science and art: “The two are interrelated to me,” Harruthoonyan has said in conversation: “Even within scholarly discourse, they are too often opposed to one another.” And indeed, Harruthoonyan’s poignant photographs remind us that time and our memory of things shape our understanding of the physical world around us, intricately interwoven strands almost impossible to disentangle. Many of his pieces also point to the fact that the political and the aesthetic form links on a deep and subconscious level. 

Or it might be said that Harruthoonyan queers his photographs to evoke interlocking themes of memory, history, identity, and the elusive passage of time. His artistic practice is marked by a multifaceted approach that weaves together elements of his cultural heritage with global influences. Describing his creative approach in more detail, gallerist Shelley De Soto eloquently notes the links between depth and surface, conscious and subliminal: “Mixing notions about multiverses and the malleability of memory, Harruthoonyan approaches the process of image-making like a scientific experiment. The process begins with source images, either personal origin stories recreated for the camera or narratives intuited from found photos. (…) He then dissects his negatives by hand, removing and reassembling layers of emulsion to test how much information he can modify and still trigger a visceral response (…) Without faces and in the void of blackness, the conspicuous figures read as archetypes open to classic Freudian projection and transference. By putting a micro/macro lens on this vast psychological space, Harruthoonyan shows us that there’s a lot to be seen in the absence of light and that multiple realities, especially the most auspicious, can endure.”

The artist’s prolific output—I counted 15 important series to his credit to date—make overarching statements about his work dubious at best. In his 2023 solo exhibition Uchronie Fragments at Atamian Hovsepian Gallery in New York City, he addressed the issue of alternate histories from a novel angle. Taken from the Greek word chronos, meaning time, and utopia, or a “no place”, the exhibition “reimagined fragments of a time and place that no longer exist.” Two men in suits shake hands but seem to look past each other (“Transference”); young women primly seated on a bench are twinned by his photographic process, suggesting a doubling of body and mind (“Entanglements”). In another room, two figures stand by a window as if propelled backwards in time (“Multiverse”), while a duo at the piano (“The Piano Players”) might just as well be African American jazz musicians as Middle Easterners from the Armenian diaspora. Drawing inspiration from his diverse upbringing in Iran, Greece and Canada, Harruthoonyan constructs visual worlds that explore how memory and identity are shaped, and reshaped, by time. Born of two SWANA cultures, he perfectly encapsulates the recent geographic politics surrounding transnationalism and exilic diasporan artistic production.

Three particularly delicate series concentrate on the natural world. Morphogenesis, a disquisition on the in-between of the natural world, presents a series of medusa-like forms before the viewer that illustrate “the moment before.” These luminous pictures of the universe intuit new forms of life that have yet to emerge—given what we know about our own physical world having emerged from stardust, they also anticipate a return to that state. Mimetically they function like a screen that seemingly displays real time transformations that have been stopped by the photographic process in the darkroom. Isolated to a corner of one photo or to the very top of another, their composition defies symmetry and calls attention to the universe’s randomness. Inspired by a David Lynch poem titled “Dark Splendor,” Saw the Splendor continues this exploration of things both cosmic (stars, planets, suns) and earthly (butterflies, mountains, clouds). A third series, Still Lifes extends this exploration. A regal white owl with closed or crossed eyes (“White Lodge”) exudes something preternatural while an exquisite black tulip shot with a black background (“Eclipse”) seems to defy what we commonly understand about that darkest of color palettes. A bunch of pomegranates (“Feast”), also set against a dark background, are strewn pell-mell on a table as light emerges from them in a distance; they might represent the Armenian fruit of life and conversely recall grenades ready to detonate in the darkness.  

In his Black Garden series, Harruthoonyan’s photographs again double as both art and artefact, documenting the millennial presence of Armenians in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh before the tragic events that led to war and the ethnic cleansing of over 120,000 Armenians from the region by the Aliyev dictatorship in Azerbaijan. Pieces such as “Wave”, “Schism,” and “Road” recall the softened darkly tinted views produced by the Claude glass portable mirror, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fog engulfs earth and sky in these lusciously austere and mystical landscapes that feel caught in a blur of existential uncertainty. His work takes a less overtly political turn in “No More Gentlemen’s Agreements,” a series of realistic black and white photographs shot in and around the abattoirs of Fort Portal and Kigale, “an ongoing long-term project documenting the supply webs, ecosystems and farmers that grow and work with fashion’s raw materials,” which include leather, cotton, horn and brass. Titles such as “Hybrid Horns,” “Dusty Velvet,” “Onlooker,” and “The Rancher” show the everyday lives of those who still subsist on traditional animal husbandry, showing to good effect Harruthoonyan’s mastery of more traditional photography.

As of this writing, the artist is currently preparing for an exhibition at The Cardinal Gallery, Toronto, which runs from March 21 to April 30, 2026, where he will present a small selection from his most recently completed series titled Folding Patterns, which he sees as “reflecting on memory, migration, and survival.” These delicate large format photographs present patterns and details taken from his childhood in the 1980s when he was a refugee in Greece during the Iran-Iraq War. Many people, recent immigrants or the descendants of displaced peoples, will identify with these intensely personal pieces, especially Armenians accustomed to collecting items sifted from past homes and countries to reconstitute new lives for themselves. As the photographer poignantly recounts: “The work features close-ups of cardboard and vintage sewing patterns my mother and I used to find while working as cardboard collectors. Sometimes, my mother would find paper patterns and fabric, and she’d use them to make dress shirts for my father to wear to work.” As he also avers, these quiet hand toned silver gelatin images transform everyday materials into intimate records of displacement and resilience. 

In a 2022 New Yorker interview, Wolfgang Tillmans declared that he could only produce work when he himself remained engaged with it: “Keeping my eyes interested or staying interested is something I can’t control… The moment I’m not interested, I can also not make interesting pictures… Even though everybody is a photographer now, somehow my pictures still stay recognizable and still stay what they are, which… can’t be taken for granted.” 

Not to be underestimated, Osheen Harruthoonyan’s work, also eminently recognizable, quietly transforms the quotidian, one photograph at a time.