A Photographic Pas de Deux

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Armed only with a tambourine, Jessica Khvedelidze will soon face the largest and toughest audience of her ballet career. But if experience is any guide, her performance will seem effortless. She will be fearless.

Jessica, 12, competes this weekend in the finals of the Youth American Grand Prix, an annual student competition at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Hoping to win cash and a scholarship to an elite ballet school, she will dance a two-minute solo from “La Esmerelda.” It could be the first steps toward the career that Jessica has yearned for since she started ballet two years ago.

“When I dance I feel free and passionate, and that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life,” she said.

Her life revolves around dance and homework. She has been working as much as 15 hours a week as she prepares for the competition.

But she hasn’t been alone.

Her parents, Russian-speaking immigrants from Georgia, are particularly supportive. And as Jessica has practiced and competed for the last six months, the photographer Arthur Nazaryan has been documenting her efforts.

At first glance, they wouldn’t seem to have much in common. He’s a quiet, polite, 28-year-old photographer and filmmaker who studied philosophy at Stony Brook University. She’s a sixth grader from Midwood, Brooklyn, whose favorite subject is gym and who spends a lot of her spare time on Facebook.

But Mr. Nazaryan is also the child of Russian immigrant parents, arriving in Hartford at the age of 5. Jessica was born in New York shortly after her parents emigrated there.

Arthur Nazaryan Jessica practiced “La Esmerelda,” a piece inspired by Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

When he was a child, Mr. Nazaryan wanted little to do with his parents’ background or the Russian language that was spoken at home.

“Embracing my Russian heritage would have made me an outsider with my peers â€" and I wanted to fit in,” he said.

Jessica seems at times to put effort into being a typical American preteen.

Mr. Nazaryan first met her when he volunteered to photograph at the Brighton Ballet Theater School of Russian-American Ballet in Brooklyn. But the story really started a few weeks earlier when he attended the Eddie Adams workshop last fall.

He had shown photos from Somalia, Afghanistan and Thailand to reviewers at the workshop. They were good images, but none of the stories had the depth that comes only with investing time in a project. More than once that weekend, he was advised to look for an in-depth story closer to home where he could return over and over.

“I decided I would do the opposite of chasing after crises around the world, and ballet was as different as it gets,” he said.

Mr. Nazaryan will continue to photograph his young subject this weekend, and no matter the outcome of the competition, they both say they will continue on their chosen paths.

“Dance is like another language to me,” Jessica said. “But instead of speaking out loud to someone, I can show them by the movement.”

Arthur Nazaryan A goofy moment at a rehearsal for “The Nutcracker.”

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