Giorgi Tsagareli
Selected Works
Director: Tamara Bokuchava, Curated by Lika Mamatsashvili
Georgian photojournalist and documentary photographer George Tsagareli was born in 1947 in Tbilisi, Georgia. At the age of 32, after his first son was born, he got interested in photography. Engineer by profession, he started to take photos of his child with an old soviet SLR camera. This is when he chose journalistic photography as a future career and he has been working in this field ever since. Currently he is working as a freelance photographer. At different times, he has worked as a photojournalist for various agencies and newspapers, such as “Georgia’s Newspaper, “Youth of Georgia”, “Georgian Information Agency”, “Prime News”, “Dialogue” Magazine, etc. He has captured many significant events taking place in the former Soviet Union and the post-Soviet era. His works actively depict today’s social and urban lives and changes.
His first solo exhibition titled “Soviet Army” took place in 1985 in Tbilisi, while personal exhibitions of his selected works were held in 1986 and 2002, for the second time. “The War Faces” exhibition featuring photographs of armed conflicts took place in 1994, while in 1998 Tsagareli had a personal exhibition titled “Jerusalem”. The photographer has created numerous photo series, such as “The Lonely” (a photo story about a lonely and poor man) (2001); “Alcoholism” (about a former doctor, who suffers from alcohol addiction) (2003); “The House of Social Therapy” (featuring portraits of people who undergo treatment for social reintegration) (2004); and “The Faces of Autism” (an exhibition dedicated to World Autism Awareness Day, 2 April that was organized by the Social Photography Caucasus Foundation and Autism Society of Georgia).
At different times, George Tsagareli has participated in various group exhibitions held abroad, such as “Georgische Künstler/innen” (Georgian Artists) at Fotogalerie Wien in 1999 (Austria), while in 2006, together with other Georgian photographers he had group exhibitions in London (UK) and Bratislava (Slovakia).