Arthur TCHOLAKIAN

Arthur Tcholakian is a New York fashion and advertising photographer. Born of Armenian parents in Jerusalem in 1928, he rejected the direction of his traditional education in music and, at the age of twenty-one, moved to Paris where he developed a consuming interest in photography. Mr. Tcholakian's first major assignment was to photograph the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; his varied experience includes covering such diverse subjects as the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the late President Nasser of Egypt in his private quarters, Pope Paul VI, and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Mr. Tcholakian's intense emotional involvement with photography is reflected in the quality and sincerity of his photographs. The Majesty of the Black Woman, his first book, was created over fifteen months of concentrated work. It derives from and reveals his concern with the problems of contemporary society to which he has directed his camera and which become, through the cooperation of his subjects, a graphic reality. The Majesty of the Black Woman is not merely reportage- it is an artist's rendering of America today.