‘This emptiness bears witness to a failed plan’
The harvest of the Anatolian travels photographer Norair Chahinian has carried out since 2012 have now been brought together in book form under the title ‘The Power of Emptiness’. Emptiness may be powerful in all its forms, however the emptiness of Anatolia has an added layer of confusion to it: If houses, ruins, mosques converted from churches, people and bones are still there, what is this huge emptiness before our eyes? Or perhaps we should turn our gaze to the last words of the text Baron Sarkis Seropyan wrote for this book: “Today, the Silk Road, Ani, monasteries, churches, and even the houses and rooms lie empty, all over, all across the land… I wonder why.”
