A box full of longing

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Armenian Weekly’s June 2026 magazine, “Reclaiming Home and Heritage,” which explores how the Armenian community maintains its heritage and culture following genocide and displacement. The issue was edited by Weekly magazine editor Pauline Getzoyan.

In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians — and only Armenians — to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return to their homeland. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. More than a century later, I encountered these photographs in the Ottoman state archives and began following the stories of the people they pictured — from the bureaucratic files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects to the naturalization records that documented their new lives as immigrants and into the family albums of their children. An intimate history of one of the earliest uses of photography for border control and exclusion, “Portraits of Unbelonging” is an invitation to learn from lives lived in radically uncertain times. This excerpt tells the story behind just one of the many photographs featured in the book.