Born in Nagorno Karabagh, Anahit Hayarapetyan made a radical career change after studying information technologies for nine years. She completed a course on photo-reportage at the World Press Photo photo-documentary department of Caucasian Institute and later continued her education in Denmark. Her mentor in 2005-2006 was the noted master Ruben Mangasaryan.

Her photo-essays began to appear on the pages of local and regional press from the very beginning of her career. She is also an active participant of exhibitions and competitions where she has won of a number of major awards. Hayrapetyan regularly writes poetry and has published two book compilations of her literary output. Currently she works as a photojournalist for EuraseaNet.

What typifies Hayrapetyan’s approach is the unusual combination of hard-edged, almost brutal documentation of reality and an exceptionally fine-tuned poetic sensibility. Working in serial format, which result in compact portfolios of ten to twenty strategically chosen photographs, Hayrapetyan likes to emphasise the expansive narrative possibilities of time and space. Like the images of Letizia Battaglia and Ruben Mangasaryan, her aim is to capture the emotional core of her subjects by distilling the context into an elegantly elemental structure that builds from one photograph to the next. Extraneous details are eliminated through the strategic use of light sources. Darkness, as in paintings by Rembrandt and Caravaggio, becomes a key device in her work. It suggests a purely imaginative space, through which the documentary content of her images acquires an almost novelistic dimension.