Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World
Alexandra Avakian
Contact Press Images
Alexandra Avakian has been traveling around the world ever since she started working as a photojournalist, and that was in 1986 in Haiti. The path she has followed was set early in life when she developed a genuine love of pictures inherited from her film-maker father, a man who generously shared this fascination with his daughter. When her beloved father died, one year after she started working in a professional capacity, she was confronted with her family history, with her Russian and Armenian background – a history of persecution and exile, with the drive and obstinate determination to resist and survive which saw her paternal grandparents move to the United States. These elements recorded in the family’s past now pursue her as she in turn pursues them when looking through her viewfinder.
Preview
Civil war and conflict, the suffering of outcasts, discoveries of mass graves, battles for independence, religious division - Alexandra Avakian has seen all this. Working for Time magazine and National Geographic, she was there to witness the major upheavals and changes in the late ’80s and early ’90s, to see the same events which are now at the center of so many international geopolitical issues. She was in Gaza at the time of the Oslo accords (1993) covering Yasser Arafat; and Somalia during the US operation “Restore Hope” (1992); she covered the Central Asian republics in the same year; and in Iran (1998) she managed to photograph everyday life, despite restrictions.
In November 2001, in the wake of 9/11, Alexandra embarked on an in-depth investigation of the Muslim community in the United States. In the Summer of 2006, one year before the war in southern Lebanon, she reported on the Hezbollah. It is the last chapter in the travel log featuring stories and moments in history, history on the move as captured by Alexandra Avakian, conveying the full force of the violence, yet seen from the angle of her own everyday experience, far removed from any simplistic view of the world.
Robert Pledge, Contact Press Images
Book: Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World by Alexandra Avakian, published by Focal Point-National Geographic, 2009.
