Nareg Hartounian

is a metro New York and Armenia-based photographer/multi-media artist with deep roots in the theatrical and visual arts.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he studied theatre arts at the American College. During these formative years, Nareg developed a deep appreciation and acute sensitivity to the magic of light, color, and motion in communicating emotion, mood and perspective on the stage.

After moving to the United States in 1988, Nareg continued to explore his creative talents through other media, including photography. Yet it was not until setting foot in his ancestral homeland of Armenia, a wonderland of early Christian monasteries and churches built with nothing but stone, space and natural light, that Nareg began to perceive the extrasensory dimensions of light and motion. Thus began his pursuit to harness these spectral energies at a single moment in time and space.

When captured through the lens of the camera, these invisible worlds within invisible worlds conjoin with objective reality to create a universe of infinite expression and interpretation.

Each image is at once representational, abstract expressionist, impressionistic, and otherworldly. These energetic auras, usually reserved for the realms of dreams, spiritual transcendences and even hallucinogenic altered states, become accessible and instantaneous to even the most grounded beholder.

This is the genesis of the Nareg Hartounian “Photaura” series. A groundbreaking art form all its own, it is a new channel by which multiple dimensions of existence and perception co-exist, converge and coalesce, weaving their way between conscious recognition and subconscious sensibility in a static image.