Rajak Ohanian's Alep Photographs at Galerie Laurent Godin

French-Armenian photographer Rajak Ohanian exhibited twelve black-and-white photographs at Galerie Laurent Godin in Paris from November 10 to December 9, 2007. The images document the orphanage quarter of Alep, Syria, where his father was deported at age eleven in 1915 during the Armenian genocide. Ohanian overlaid the prints with citations from historians (A.J. Toynbee, Y. Ternon), moral authority Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Ottoman Interior Minister Talaat's April 1915 circular ordering massacres and spoliation. The citations have no spaces between words, making reading difficult and disrupting the image. The work links individual memory to collective tragedy, aiming to prevent recurrence: one citation notes that if the League of Nations had recognized the genocide in the 1920s, Kurds might have avoided similar persecutions. Another citation references the 1987 desecration of a memorial in Décines, France. The photographs show closed doors, barred windows, walls, dark alleys, and the distant citadel of Alep; rare figures appear from behind as shadows. Ohanian's project asserts that testimony and history are the only remedy against the powerlessness of images and denialism.