TITLE: The Milky Way over Barney Lake

Barney Lake, Hoover Wilderness, Eastern Sierras, California

AUTHOR: Vahe Peroomian (United States)

Vahé Peroomian is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from UCLA in March, 1994, specializing in numerical simulations of space plasmas, and has carried out research in that field for the past 21 years.  
Vahé's love of photography as a child and young adult blossomed into a passion fifteen years ago. Since then, he has taken every opportunity to pursue his fascination with photography and the beauty of the Gaian landscape. He is a self-trained photographer, and prefers a hands-on approach and independent experimentation with photographic styles and techniques. He has found that the same off-the-wall approach that works in solving physics problems helps him see landscapes in a new light as well. The self-similar shapes in landscapes, and the play between cloud and landscape that characterize many of his photographs are a manifestation of this viewpoint.
A Photographic Journey of my Homeland, Armenia, was the product of Vahé’s desire to photograph Armenia in the same light that gave life to his photographs of American national parks. Vahe’s passion for his homeland, which he had visited as a teenager and as a young adult during 1980, 1981, and 1990, grew by leaps and bounds when he returned to Armenia twice in 2003. On these trips, with every short walk, and with every kilometer driven, he wiped clean the slate of his early impressions of Armenia, and fell in love with the vibrant landscape, teeming with life, with beauty, and with ancient wonders. A four-day trip to Artsakh, three magical nights spent in Shushi, built atop a nearly unscalable cliff offering spectacular vistas interspersed with newly rebuilt churches and Soviet era blocky apartment buildings still bearing the wounds of war, were the highlights of the five weeks he spent in Armenia that summer. The twelve photo essays presented in the book span eight years, from October 2004 to September 2011, during which he spent an additional 90 days in Armenia during nearly every season and during a lifetime’s worth of moods. A Photographic Journey of my Homeland, Armenia was published in 2014 and is now in its second printing.