Andrew Sovjani (b. 1967) is a fine art Photographer and Printmaker. He grew up in a family of working artists and after a few years trying to escape the artistic pull, both as a mechanical engineer and an international businessman living in Japan, he returned to his creative roots and picked up a camera. Since then, his award winning work has been shown in exhibitions throughout the U.S., Europe and Japan and is held in many public and private collections. He has won awards of distinction at many of the top fine arts festivals in the nation and was a finalist for the Critical Mass book awards.

Andrew has his studio in Easthampton, an old mill town near the Berkshires in western Massachusetts.

Statements from two ongoing series are presented below;

“Almost Gone”

As I age, I've become more and more attracted to things that are disappearing. These are objects and places that are seemingly no longer needed in today's society. This series of images is about nostalgia and our past. They are meant to be hints or triggers that bring back memories like the smoky sweet smell of pipe tobacco and a dear uncle or grandfather.

Since I often think I am a painter trapped inside a photographer's body, I have chosen to print this series as reAction prints, a multi-day printing technique that I've developed that blurs the lines between painting and photography.

The first day, traditional film negatives are projected onto silver gelatin paper and developers are applied with brushes, guided only by the dim amber glow of the safelight. Then over the next several days, bleaches, acids and various homemade toners are wiped, brushed, stenciled and dripped on to each print, altering the silver compounds in the paper. When to halt the process is determined by intuition and aided by the experience of ruining hundreds of sheets of paper. Tonal and color changes happen throughout the process so that I don't know what the final image will look like until the print is dry.

The end result is a one-of-a-kind print that embodies my original photographic vision as well as the event of printing, that unique combination of emotion, environmental conditions, and happenchance. Unique prints range in size from 15x15 to 30x40.

“Folding Light”

These images are about the study of light and it's nuances. I have chosen ordinary paper as a blank canvas in order to explore the interactions of light, shadow, line and space. Illuminated by the natural light filtering through a north window, simple paper can be transformed into the curves of a figure, the movement of a wave or the buildings of a city block. Each image is available as 10x10” and 15x15” archival pigment prints. Editions are limited to 50. A few select images are available as 30x30” prints in an edition of 15.

A PDF version of my Curriculum Vitae is available here : CV