Publisher: The Moscow News
The gush and gloop of oil has fuelled the economies of the former Soviet Union, turning frosty Siberian outposts into industrial hubs, sloshing billions of dollars through a remade Moscow and thrusting pipelines through politically sensitive regions as the world scrambles for petro-influence.
Yet amid the breathless enthusiasm of the new generation of oil-rich oligarchs, few have paid attention to the human impact of this mega-industry – something which Azerbaijani photographer Rena Effendi highlights in her exhibition Pipe Dreams.
The project began when she was commissioned to produce a glossy calendar for oil giant BP, highlighting their social projects along the Azeri section of the Baku-Tbilisi-
Ceyhan pipeline.
“I hated those photos,” said Effendi in a telephone interview from Baku. “It was a commercial assignment and they drove me from one programme to another in the back of a car. There were many wonderful projects, but in between there were all these other realities that I couldn’t delve into.
“I decided to go back and travel from Baku to Ceyhan, photographing what I found along the way.”
That journey took her from the nightclubs and prostitutes of Baku, reaping the wealth of – especially expat – oil workers, through dirt-poor rural communities where the coming of the pipeline has shattered an ancient way of life, often with at best meagre compensation.
The pipeline’s route from the Caspian oil fields to the ports of the Mediterranean is far from simple, reflecting the fractured politics of the region. The direct route, via Armenia, is impossible while the simmering conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh awaits resolution.
Instead the route runs through Georgia, skirting the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia before plunging into Eastern Turkey with its strong Kurdish independence movement.
Politics play a big part in these images as well. In one, the daughter of a Nagorno-Karabakh refugee family in Sabirabad poses in front of a portrait of the late president Heydar Aliyev, whose “deal of the century” brought BP and other Western oil firms to the country. On the Turkish leg, a Kurdish politician is snapped while receiving a phone call from the military police to tell him not to talk to journalists.
Highlighting the darker side of the oil industry has divided audiences back home, where the exhibition and subsequent book have never been seen.
“My personal copies of the book were taken at the border and I only have one copy myself,” Effendi said. “It hasn’t been translated into Azeri. People here are not used to independent journalism, and there’s a lot of self-censorship – it’s quite similar to Russia, but I think it’s even worse here.
“The German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview and a review of the exhibition and that got a lot of reaction online in Azerbaijan. Some people thought I’d done a terrible thing, that I was showing the ugly side of our country.
“But others argued back, saying they were sick of this nice facade where everyone’s living a bubble.
“I’m not making a tourist brochure about my country – I’m trying to show reality through my own eyes.”
Perhaps surprisingly, given her bleak images of the oily aftermath of the pipeline, Effendi refuses to slam the whole project.
“I’m not against the idea of the pipeline – overall it’s good for the country,” she said. “But I wanted to show another side to it.
“In most cases the ordinary people don’t get benefits, or benefit very little from this.”
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