Father Land by Vahé and Ara Oshagan is a poetic and personal journey through the rugged, human-and-history-laden landscape of the mountainous Republic of Nagorno–Karabagh. It is also a unique collaboration between a photographer son and his well–known, writer father. A family steeped in Armenian literature and art, Vahé and Ara Oshagan’s work is the result of an intensely felt connection to their heritage and homeland. Father Land is a literary and visual contemplation of Karabagh’s present–day, its history and its culture, as well as a meditation on transnational identity, land, and paternal bonds.

Springing from a deep understanding of the Armenian people and their unique past, Vahé Oshagan;s essay presents a reflective, yet witty and fluid, account of his encounters with people from all walks of Karabagh life. It touches upon topics as diverse as the happenings of the 8th–century BC, the recent war of liberation, the dialect of the people, their worldview, their contradictions, their body language, their spirituality, and their legendary hospitality. It is an accomplished piece of imaginative literature, weaving between literary and literal, creative and factual, objective and subjective reflection.

Ara Oshagan’s photographs depict a complex and layered vision of Karabagh. Functioning on documentary as well as symbolic levels, they reflect his encounters in the region as seen from his own intensely personal point of view. At times capturing an intimate familial moment; at other times, in the street, observing the chaos of life; or reverent in the presence of Karabagh’s millennial churches, the images simultaneously document, explore, and reflect upon Karabagh’s precarious present and his own place in this Father Land.

Taken together, the text and images are symbiotic and deeply connected—like the father and son who produced the work–and they portray a region and a culture as old as the bonds of family and society themselves.