In conclusion, we report a detailed investigation of electronic properties of two nanographenes, GQD and GNR. We find that these model compounds can be solubilized into aqueous solutions using surfactants and into organic solvents using edge chlorination. The nanographenes in aqueous media were found to aggregate, causing significant shortening of their excited-state lifetimes. The chlorinated samples, despite a certain degree of aggregation, were found to exhibit long-lived charge-transfer excited states. Our computational studies indicate that the excitonic features in GNRs are delocalized over at most monomeric units and that they exhibit chargetransfer character, with bipyrimidine moieties acting as electron-accepting units. The absorption spectra of GNRs span a large portion of the visible, up to 700 nm, making them promising lightharvesting motifs. Time-resolved experiments reveal that Cl-GNR and Cl-GNR undergo efficient ISC, probably facilitated by large density of electronic states, to form long-lived triplet excited states (15.7 and 106 s, respectively). We anticipate that this study will inspire future work involving coordination of metal catalysts to the bipyrimidine sites of Cl-GNRs and further investigations into the fundamental photophysics of such GNR/catalyst assemblies and their applications in photocatalysis.