In her latest collection, "Oil Village," Azeri photographer Rena Effendi pairs images of the environmental fallout of Azerbaijan's oil boom with photographs of butterflies collected by her entomologist father. Effendi's book Pipe Dreams: A Chronicle of Lives Along the Pipeline, was published in 2009. Her work is currently featured in the Open Society Foundations' Moving Walls exhibit. She spoke with Revenue Watch this December.
How did you come to the topic of "Oil Village"?
This show follows up on a seven-year project that became my first book, Pipe Dreams, a journey along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline through three countries, connecting the Caspian with the Mediterranean. While the BTC work focused on the social impact of the pipeline, "Oil Village" is about the environmental side of things: the issue of Soviet industrial malpractice.
In 2008, Baku was named by Forbes as the most polluted city in the world. I photographed the areas surrounding Baku—old Soviet oil fields that were started at the turn of the last century, then inherited by the Soviet state. These oil lakes are still there today. They've become noxious dump yards of oil mixed with trash, with people living right among them.
Sumgayit, a city about 20 minutes from Baku, was a cradle of the Soviet petrochemical industry. Huge soviet factories were built, with schools, hospitals and housing complexes on the grounds. Today they are half-abandoned or closed down and the pollution from these factories is affecting the population of the city.
My father was an entomologist and he collected 90,000 butterflies in the region. All that remains from his work are photographs of 50 butterflies that are endangered or extinct. I combined the butterflies and these industrial landscapes and the portraits of the people living among the pollution as a metaphor for the fragility of nature: a project on endangered butterflies and endangered people.
Are the butterflies endangered due to pollution?
Some, yes, but more because of urban expansion. Baku has undergone a lot of changes. It's now overpopulated. Because of the oil economy, most of the jobs are in the city; the industry doesn't provide jobs outside urban centers, so people have flown in from the countryside. Half of Azerbaijan's population now lives in Baku. We've had a housing boom. That affects the environment, as trees are cut down and butterflies lose their habitats.
Additionally, this is happening with a complete lack of urban planning. A neighborhood of one-, two- or three-story buildings has been replaced with 12-, 16- or 20-floor highrises, in a place where there is no infrastructure to support them. They're putting in generators and taking power from smaller neighborhoods somewhere else in Baku. The urban infrastructure is cracking. There's no parking, and with all the new money, there are more cars, and the traffic has become horrendous.
They've given the city center a facelift, but once you go outside, the neighborhoods are still the same. It's kind of a Potemkin village. Everything has accelerated and it's all connected with the oil industry and the way the government still doesn't have a long-term vision for diversifying the economy.
Meanwhile, the people I photographed are living inside abandoned Soviet factories without natural light or in cardboard homes. The contrast between the urban poor and the urban rich has become wild.
There's a huge divide. The division between rich and poor is recognized, but stifled. If someone wants to raise that issue, it's frowned upon.
When my publisher sent me copies of my book, it was confiscated by the government agent at the border. They sent it to all of the government ministers, and they decided this book can't come into the country and they destroyed it. They said the book is basically the voice of the opposition, meant to incriminate the regime, even though it's not. It's a book that tells the story of the people, simply showing the way things are. They took it the other way, as the anti-picture. So they unofficially banned it. They stopped it right at the border and didn't let it inside.
Whenever there are issues like that, it's taboo, you don't discuss it. You only show the nice picture, the smiling picture, of the oil boom.
In Azerbaijan, there are large construction projects with no one working on them, restaurants with no customers.
Another big challenge we're dealing with is corruption that permeates all levels of society, including government. A lot of the construction projects—the bridges, underpasses and roads—have this corruption story. There's a problem with money laundering. Some projects are built for that reason. The center of town has Dolce & Gabbana and diamond stores, where no one shops. The government invites world-renowned architects to build these incredible buildings—like a building designed as a silk ribbon floating in the air—and they spend millions on them. But right behind that you see this building where refugees are still living and hanging their laundry. These contrasts are more evident today.
The government is putting a lot of money into PR campaigns, trying to paint Azerbaijan as a clean European country. Stories like this get lost in the madness of trying to make a good image for the country. The purpose of this project is to remind people that there are human costs and challenges to oil.
Photos by Rena Effendi / INSTITUTE.
