Lord of the Flies. I came back from one of my leaves with a video downloaded on my smartphone. It showed an Armenian mixed martial arts fighter beating an Azerbaijani rival and dedicating his victory to the soldiers, i.e. these boys. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Comrades in Arms, Unarmed. It’s common for Armenian men to address each other as "brothers," but the 18-year-old conscripts stranded in these uninhabited mountains became closer than many relatives could ever get to one another. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Finally, Some Rest. Street dogs and cats were frequent guests at the remote outpost. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
The Amputee. Mine explosions leave thousands of injured animals all over the world’s conflict zones, and Karabakh is no exception. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Our Daily Bread. I taught my younger brothers-in-arms how to cut the tinned stewed meat into cubes, as it was the easiest way to get rid of extra sinew. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
The Nestlings. This picture of baby birds in their nest struck me as the most accurate metaphor for the life I saw every day, of the 18-year-old privates, their souls wide open to the world, and deeply dependant on other’s decisions and opinions. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
The Vortex. The barbed wire fence, a border strip defense, may eventually develop into a kind of funnel or vortex. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
D.I.Y. The outpost was surrounded by the hand-fabricated alarm system produced from used tin cans. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Morpheus, Take Me Away. Each one of us had our own dreams and kept our special memories, but the sleep was a dream we all shared, the common thing we all lusted after ceaselessly. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Night Landscape, with Chapel. The wooden chapel served as a guiding light for those wandering in the deserted mountains. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Point of View. When looking through an optical sight, I felt a predatory instinct waking inside of me—an instinct to kill. Doesn't matter what you aim at—it may be a bird, a man on your side or an enemy—pulling the trigger was a next step, logically. And then I get conflicted: for whatever reason, I stop myself from firing on my fellow soldiers. Doesn't that same reason apply to the youngsters standing on the other side as well? © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Winged Boots. An extension of feet—combat boots—eventually became indistinguishable from the feet themselves, a weird prolongation of human flesh. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017
One to Protect. The people who these boys were supposed to defend were left behind. The helpless animals were the neighbors to love as yourself. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Pantheism. 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality. In this case, these boys were gods, so inseparable had they become from the nature around them. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Postcards from mountains. As the days passed by, I used to look at the splendid nature surrounding the outpost and just hope that there is no one on this planet who'd prefer to be stationed here as a soldier, with order to kill, than to come here with their kids to discover nature's numerous wonders. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
A Stranger. This image of a man stationed inside a pillbox, while formally a self-portrait, is more a portrait of another person I turned into during these war days. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Canned Herring. Our outpost wasn’t spacious enough to provide every soldier with a bed, which was one of our favorite things to joke about — we liked, for example, to compare ourselves to herrings in a can. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
Tranquillity, and Fog. Electric towers, covered with fog, reminiscent of the Calvary—although they have nothing to do with death. They are just traces of human activity on the surface of Earth. © Areg Balayan. 2nd Place, Series, LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017.
