I didn’t know much about Yerevan’s LGBT community when in, in 2010, I decided to start documenting their everyday lives.

But like everyone else in the city, I knew that there was a park called Komaygi in front of the mayor’s office where cross-dressers and transgender people — many of them sex workers — gathered at night. I wanted to find out who these people were. Once in a while, their stories would catch the attention of the media, but only when some fervent defender of public morality physically attacked a cross-dresser, or a politician issued a call to cleanse the park of so-called immoral people. Otherwise, we knew nothing about them.

Lorena, at the park where transgender people used to work at night before the municipality drove them out, 2010.

The first night I arrived in the park, I was immediately surrounded by people. They asked me why I was there and what I wanted. I told them that I simply wanted to photograph. Many wanted to know how much would I pay them. I said that I didn’t pay the people I photographed. One of them, Lorena, said that she didn’t mind.

We met at an apartment. It belonged to Layma and Lorena, and four other people lived there too. At first I was terrified. I didn’t know what sort of people I was dealing with. All I knew was that they were sex workers, who received several clients a day there.