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This Picture I Gift

An Armenian Memoir

by Michelle Andonian
Foreword by Robert Ourlian

Photography, Armenian Studies

Hardback
Published: September 2015
ISBN: 9780692030509
Pages: 112 Size: 11 x 7.875
Illustrations: 95
$65.00
Book Images

A prize-winning photojournalist and visual artist, Michelle Andonian has documented people and places around the world for three decades. Now, in her most personal work, This Picture I Gift, tales from her Detroit childhood inspire a modern journey—and a timeless vision of Armenia and Armenians.

As the author comes to terms with the life of her grandmother, a survivor of the twentieth century’s first genocide, she documents a journey that spanned one hundred years and three generations through photographs and memoirs. In captivating photographic detail, the book revisits and explores lost historical lands and landmarks, bringing them together with present-day Armenia to honor an ancient people determined to live on.

This beautifully printed and hand-assembled book has an exposed Smyth sewn binding with dust jacket, housed in a pocketed drop-spine outer hardcover wrapped in cloth.

Published by: Veduta Books

Michelle Andonian is an award-winning photographer. Her most personal work tells the stories of Armenian Genocide survivors and the 1988 earthquake and has resulted in several trips to Armenia. As a producer, director, and photographer, she spent a decade photographing children’s philanthropic programs around the world. A lifelong Detroiter, she began her career at the Detroit News, where she was nominated for a Pulitzer for a month long assignment in Israel.

Robert Ourlian is the foreign policy and national security editor for the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau and has worked on many of the most significant issues of the past decade. A writer and editor for thirty-six years, he also has worked for the Los Angeles Times and earned journalism’s George Polk Award while at the Detroit News, his hometown paper.

This Picture I Gift—words written on the back of a photograph sent by an Armenian woman to her unknown husband-to-be in America—is like a tissue of recovered memory. Michelle Andonian’s extraordinary photographs of abandoned homes in both Armenia and historic Armenia (now Turkey), and of the faces of Armenian children who endure despite all, is a gift to Armenians wherever they are and indeed to all citizens of our global village.

– Aram Saroyan, author of Complete Minimal Poems and Still Night in L.A.

Michelle Andonian captures perfectly the severe lyrical gorgeousness that is Armenia. Her intense photographs take me to that place where every rock, every face, every blade of grass reflects a struggle between dark violence and thrilling beauty. Immerse yourself in these photographs and know 'Hayastan'.

– Eric Bogosian, author of Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide

Beautiful and memorable images are compiled in a unique compendium showcasing not only a land and its people, but the photographer's legacy to future generations. Flawlessly reproduced and a delight to simply browse through, This Picture I Gift: An Armenian Memoir is very highly recommended.

– Julie Summers, The Midwest Book Review