Anush Babajanyan

Anush Babajanyan, VII Photo/National Geographic Society

Women visit a hot spring that has emerged from the dried bed of the Aral Sea, near Akespe village, Kazakhstan, on 27 August 2019. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea has lost 90 percent of its content since river water was first diverted to serve agriculture and industry in the 1960s.

Anush Babajanyan is a photographer whose work focuses on social narratives and personal stories. She is a contributing photographer at the VII Foundation and is a National Geographic Explorer.

Anush has documented the Nagorno-Karabakh region for over six years, with the resulting photographs compiled in the book A Troubled Home. Alongside her work in the South Caucasus, Anush also photographs in Central Asia, where she has focused on environmental stories.

In 2019, she was the winner of the Canon Female Photojournalist Grant and in 2024 she was recipient of the 2024 Romano Cagnoni Award. Her photography has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Foreign Policy Magazine, among other international publications.