Biography

Craig Varjabedian is an award-winning photographer who explores the back roads of the American West, making pictures of the unique and quintessential. He shares awe-inspiring stories of the land and the people who live on it—one photograph at a time.

CRAIG VARJABEDIAN'S photographs of the American West illuminate his profound connection with the region and its people. His finely detailed images shine with an authenticity that reveals the ties between identity, place, and the act of perceiving. For Varjabedian, photography is a receptive process driven by openness to the revelation each subject offers rather than by the desire to manipulate form or to catalog detail. He achieves this vision by capturing and suspending on film those decisive moments in which the elements and the spirit of a moment come together. 

From his intimate portraits to expansive landscapes, Varjabedian’s images, made both in black & white and color, celebrate each subject’s relationship to the photographer. “The one thing that never changes is that moment of recognition when I feel the play of light, shadow, and texture resolve itself into something amazing,” Varjabedian wrote in his book Four and Twenty Photographs: Stories from Behind the Lens. Through this process he offers viewers a new way of seeing—one that transcends mundane perception and expands our awareness of the potential in every moment. 

In recognition of the significance and power of his images, Varjabedian has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the McCune Charitable Foundation, and the New Mexico Humanities Council. His photographs have been exhibited and collected by museums around the country including the William Benton Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art,  the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Recently prints from Varjabedian's traveling exhibition of Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby were acquired by the Foundation for the Albuquerque Museum of Art.

In 1991 Varjabedian received an Emmy Award for his collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Karl Kernberger on the PBS documentary En Divina Luz: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico. Photographs from this project were published in a book by the same name, with an essay by award-winning author Michael Wallis (1994). His next book, By the Grace of Light: Images of Faith from Catholic New Mexico (1998), came out of the bonds he developed with the people and communities of the Morada Photographic Survey. Recent books of his photographs, published by the University of New Mexico Press, include Four & Twenty Photographs: Stories from Behind the Lens (2007), Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby (2009), which received the prestigious Wrangler Award for Outstanding Photography Book from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and Landscape Dreams: A New Mexico Portrait (2012) published to coincide with New Mexico’s Centennial of Statehood celebrations. 

Craig Varjabedian's book Into The Great White Sands, a photographic exploration of White Sands National Park, was published in 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press. More recently he published The Light of Days Gone By, The Gifts of Fleeting Grace, and Light of the Great Mystery (revised ed. 2021) which presents portraits from his Native Light Photo Collaboration.