It took a while for Yrevan-born photographer Ilya Vartanian to find his creative path. After having changed several universities in his home city, he moved to Moscow in 1993 and bought his first camera a couple of years later. However, his professional debut only came in 2004. Commissioned by the then-trendsetting Afisha magazine, he captured Svetlana Zakharova, prima ballerina of the Bolshoi theatre, in a typical Soviet kitchen amid various pots and pans. The shoot was a massive success, and since then Vartanian's imaginative celebrity portraits and atmospheric fashion stories appeared in the most respected magazines, from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to GQ and Esquire. In 2009, after the birth of his son, Ilya started working on his passion project titled “Dreams of Armenia”. A photographic love letter to his homeland, it took 9 long years to complete and was first shown in a solo exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. The poetic pictures can also be seen in the ARMENIA book by Ilya Vartanian.