Continuing to chat about the personal introduction chapter, the other thing that drew me to cover tough situations in difficult countries undergoing change was that like many American immigrants the Armenian side of my family had experienced some rather challenging events before coming to the United States. My family had to move often between northern Iran, the Caucuses, and Russia, according to the dangers and pressures they faced.

In the photo above, Mount Ararat--where the bible says Noah's ark landed--is Armenia's holy mountain and stands in Turkey. I photographed it from Armenian wheat fields. 

I began learning the details when I was about 20. My family didn't want to tell us about it when we were too young.

My family experienced the Russian Revolution and many of my grandmother's relatives were wiped out in Stalin's Great Terror. And in the early 1800s they barely survived a cholera epidemic in Armenia. The Iranian side of the family also lived through the Constitutional and 1979 Revolutions of Iran.

They fled the Armenian Genocide of 1915 as violence also spilled over the Persian border, plus several smaller massacres before and after that. Turkish Armenian relatives also survived the Genocide. During that time there was no UN in existence to stop the organized killings. There was no bunch of international photojournalists to document it in pictures. But there were some military officers from Germany and Russia who did photograph the killing fields. There were diplomats who witnessed it and reported. The genocide and the massacres were covered well by reporters in the New York Times, National Geographic magazine, and other publications of the day--and extensively in the Arabic press. In 1915 there was no such word as "genocide"--it was created later to describe the Jewish Holocaust and describes other cases of government-organized ethnic cleansing as well.