Nino Jorjadze lived and worked in the 19th - 20th centuries in Georgia (1884-1968). She came from an aristocratic family. Being endowed with many talents she     received excellent education in Europe and upon   return to her homeland in 1914 she went to the Caucasus front as a volunteer.  Nino Jorjadze is the first amateur woman photographer who took the World War I photos   seen through the eyes of a sister of charity. She is the only one who created the pictorial review of the War.  Certainly there were many famous professional photographers, such as  Dmitri Ermakov, Vladimir Barkanov, Dmitri Nikitin and others   who took the WWI photos, but their mission was limited to the function  of invited photographers, while Nino Jorjadze created the war chronicles from the perspective of the direct participant of the war, where she served as a Sister of Charity of the Red Cross.  Consequently,   her   works   reflecting     tragic events of the war   are of a great artistic value and   occupy a unique place in the history of Georgian photography. Nino Jorjadze was born to a family of a famous entrepreneur and public figure, Zakharia Jorjadze and Tamar Bagration-Mukhraneli. After completing the course of Sisters of Charity, she became the member of the Red Cross organization. She took the photos of WWI Caucasus front   with her  brother’s – Giorgi Jorjadze’s “Kodak” camera in Sarikamish, Kars, Anis, Nazik,  Karakamis, Ani ruins  and other locations. She lived the life of the war routine and witnessed all   she captured with her camera   reflecting the facts on the ground, extreme situations, dramatic events, spontaneous reality. She portrayed her own self on the front line,    the deceased, generals, officers, doctors, refugees, actual participants of the war, the hard days of the outbreak of typhoid epidemic, ruined roads, and those participants of the war who later were declared heroes. She deliberately preserved all   materials.  Besides, Nino Jorjadze kept the diary which holds the whole reality of the war and reflects the moments impossible to capture with camera: conversations,   relationships between people, feelings, her thoughts about the truths of life and a mission of a human being.  The diary and a photo album show the full picture of the Caucasus Front of   WWI. In her diary she wrote about all things   caused by war tension and turmoil, inconceivable transformation of people in extreme situations: “After the Sarikamish battle I was born anew. I saw the impossible, most cruel sufferings…  People become like Gods in the battle rejecting all that’s personal in the name of something supreme.  It is the genuine manifestation of a human’s spirit in all its glory. The mind can’t embrace the whole horror of war…” (March, 1914).   Nino Jorjadze’s life was full of most diverse feelings and dramatic events which she often wrote about. She deliberately abandoned the peaceful and comfortable life, went to the front where she saw and got used to the most ruthless manifestation of a person’s inner “self”, she wrote about that reality and captured it in her photos. Her feelings were rather contradictory: on the one hand she was a woman fighting against the ruthless reality and on the other, she   could reveal the deepest and   most tender feelings: “Love is not just falling in love. This great and serious feeling is not   a gust of passion but it furtively crops up in the relationship of the two. This is the intimacy of      two souls and penetration into each other’s inner world. Love is the supreme frame of mind, the thirst to see the world in the new light and grow to love it. Though at some time and somewhere lust gets in the way”. “The Diary of the Soul”, November 1913. The exhibition dedicated to Nino Jorjadze includes essential materials about WWI, photos reflecting the events developed in the East, historical figures, ethnographic groups, everyday scenes and city views.

Nino Jorjadze is an outstanding photographer in the history of Georgian photography who lived in the most complex reality and created thematically rich and diverse chronicles of the war. She is a creative intellectual, documentary photographer, who played an exceptional role in the history of the development of photography of our country of that epoch. 

 Lika Mamamtsashvili

The owners of the family archive are Tamar Lortkifanidze and Aleksandre Bagrationi