There Is Only the Earth: Images from the Armenian Diaspora Project

Scout Tufankjian is a Brooklyn-based Armenian-American photographer best known for her documentation of the Barack Obama presidential campaigns, work that produced Yes We Can: Barack Obama’s History-Making Presidential Campaign, a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller that sold out its first run of 55,000 copies a month before publication. During Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, a photograph she took of the President and First Lady embracing in Iowa became the most retweeted and most-liked image in Facebook’s history at that time. Beyond her political work, Tufankjian has spent the bulk of her career in the Middle East, including four years in the Gaza Strip and extensive time in Egypt documenting the Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath.

There Is Only the Earth is the culmination of six years spent by Tufankjian documenting Armenian communities in more than twenty countries, a portrait of a diaspora of over eight million people living across eighty-five countries, shaped by three thousand years of upheaval, the 1915 Armenian Genocide, and an extraordinary capacity for survival, resilience, and community. With more than 160 photographs, the book was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign and published in 2015. It is among the most significant works of documentary photography published on the Armenian diaspora. de.MO designed the book, documentary photography book design in service of a project of deep historical and human importance, bringing visual coherence and considered design to a body of work that spans continents and generations.