Born 1907, Indianapolis, Indiana
Died 1993, Davis, California

The daughter of Armenian refugees, Ashjian graduated with an English degree from Butler University, Indianapolis, in 1927. She moved to New York in the 1930s; there she married the journalist Charles Smith Preston in 1937, whom she had met at a meeting of the John Reed Club, an organization of leftist artists and writers. Sometime in the early 1930s she and Preston joined the Communist Party—a common affiliation of intellectuals and progressives in that period. Exactly when she began to make photographs is unclear, but by 1937, when she graduated from the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York and joined the Photo League, she was already producing work in a documentary vein. She was elected director of the League’s school in 1938 and served as vice president of the Photo League in 1940 and 1941. At the League, she was a member of Aaron Siskind’s Feature Group and took part in the Harlem Document project, an extended photo-documentation of Harlem made by a group of ten photographers between 1936 and 1940. In 1943, after her husband became ill, Ashjian returned to Indianapolis with her family and gave up professional photography, taking a job at a union. She remained an ardent leftist throughout her life, but under the pressure of McCarthyism resigned from the Communist Party in around 1949. From 1946 to 1980 she worked for progressive organizations in Indianapolis; Morgantown, Kentucky; and York, Pennsylvania. With her husband, she retired in 1980 to Davis, California.