Deinstitutionalisation, Kutaisi, Georgia
Photographs © Onnik James Krikorian 2007.
ARTICLES ABOUT DEINSTITUTIONALISATION
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
A mother waits patiently to enroll her son at an Auxiliary Boarding School for children with learning disabilities somewhere in the heart of the Armenian capital. It doesn’t seem to matter to the staff that the twelve-year old isn’t disabled, all the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate.
First published 2003
CHILDREN OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
At just eight months of age, Tiesa and her two sisters were abandoned by a roadside. They survived by eating roadkill — frogs, in fact — and drinking water from puddles before being discovered. The children, two of them with learning disabilities, were placed in Tbilisi’s Infant House, an orphanage by any other name.
First published 2014
LATEST BLOG POSTS
Cross Riders Motorcycle Club (MC), Tbilisi, Georgia
Over the past few weeks a number of publications have published my photo story on the Cross Riders Motorcycle Club (MC) in Tbilisi, Georgia — probably the first ever ‘classic’ MC, as we know the term in the West, in the South Caucasus. True, I covered the Hye Riders MC in Armenia a decade ago, but it was more nationalist in spirit rather than the Cross Riders who instead seem to be united only by a love of bikes and drinking crazily.
BBC Azeri: Azerbaijani Carpets Rewoven
Last week BBC Azeri published my video report on reWoven, a sustainable development project to revive and sustain the art of traditional carpet weaving among Georgia’s ethnic Azeri minority. I had interviewed Ryan Smith, reWoven’s founder, over a month ago during an exhibition of some of the carpets made as part of the project, but only got to visit one of the villages where some of the weavers live last weekend.
Photos on the sidelines of a cross-border South Caucasus media workshop in Luxor, Egypt
Late last month through to the beginning of this one I was in Egypt to present for and facilitate a cross-border workshop for journalists and analysts from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia as well as the disputed territories of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabakh.