Scout Tufankjian

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Scout Tufankjian is an Armenian-American photojournalist and author based in Brooklyn, New York. She is well known for her photos of American president Barack Obama during his campaign leading up to his presidency. She is also known for her photojournalism work on the Armenian diaspora.

She was born in 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts, to an Armenian-American father, Allan, a lawyer, and an Irish-American mother, Betty. She grew up in the south shore towns of Whitman and Scituate, both in Massachusetts.^[1] As a child she was separated from the Armenian community in Massachusetts. Her knowledge of her Armenian heritage came from reading magazines and newspapers that she found at her grandparents' home. She started shooting in Northern Ireland at age 18.

She attended and earned a B.A. in political science and government from Yale University in 2000.

Languages : English, Arabic

From 2006 to 2008 she covered Senator Barack Obama's campaign for President of the United States, and was the only independent journalist to follow him from the run-up to his announcing his candidacy through his victory on election night.^[2] Tufankjian took more than 12,000 photographs throughout the campaign.^[3] She released a book featuring a selection of the photographs titled Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign in December 2008, which sold out its initial 55,000-copy run a month before it was released.^[2]

In 2010 she went to cover the Haiti Earthquake and its aftermath.

From 2011 to 2012 Tufankjian went to Egypt to photograph The Egyptian Revolution. From this time she has photos categorized as The Egyptian Revaluation, The Detainees, Along the Barricades, Endgame, The Egyptian Elections and Egypt's Salafi Community.

In August 2012, Tufankjian took a photo of Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama hugging each other. The photo was taken in Dubuque, Iowa on August 15. Instead of focusing on the Obamas as political figures, Tufankjian focused on them as a couple. The Obama campaign staff sent this picture out on the official Obama Facebook and Twitter accounts the night of the election, November 6. 2012. This picture became the most liked photo on Facebook and most retweeted tweet in history.^[4][5]

In 2015 Tufankjian published in commemoration of the centennial of the Armenian genocide, There is only the Earth: Images for Armenian Diaspora. Tufankjian took six years and traveled to five different continents gathering stories and photos of the Armenian people who were killed and displaced from their homes by the Ottoman government between 1915 and 1923. Tufankjian traveled to Ethiopia, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, France, United States, Hong Kong, and Canada in search of Armenian communities, photographing Armenian lives around the world. In showing how the Armenian people survived, Tufankjian's photos capture everyday life, from religious to the romantic to the familial.

• Images from the Middle East (2006)
• Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign (2008)
• Haiti 2010 The Haitian Earthquake, A Tale of Two Camps
• Egypt 2011-2012: A Year of Revaluation
• There Is Only the Earth: Images from the Armenian Diaspora Project, Melcher Media, 2015. A photojournalist's study of the Armenian diaspora on its 100th anniversary
• Commissioned work: The HALO Trust: 100 Women in Demining (2017)
• Ongoing Projects Karabakh: 2002-2020

In 2010, Scout Tufankjian married Nate Schenkkan, who is also a Yale and Columbia graduate and former journalist.^[6]

• Gonzalez, David, "Following the Global Armenian Diaspora", The New York Times, 24 April 2014

• Scout Tufankjian's website
• An interview at buzzflash.com
• "Armenian roots and traveling with Obama – interview with photojournalist Scout Tufankjian", news.am, 19 November 2012