Rena Effendi: Liquid Land

Rena Effendi is an Azerbaijani freelance photographer. Her work focuses on themes of environment, post-conflict society, the effects of oil industry on people, and social disparity. As of 2019, she is based in Istanbul, Turkey.

Azerbaijan – 

Liquid Land is co-authored with my father Rustam Effendi, a dissident scientist and entomologist who devoted his life to studying, hunting and collecting over 90,000 butterflies in the Soviet Union. Inherited by the Azerbaijani State Institute of Zoology after his death in 1991, his vast collection has disintegrated. Alongside thousands of glass boxes filled with butterfly dust, the only remaining visual evidence of his life’s work is the fifty photographs of endangered butterflies for a manuscript he never published.

Next to my father’s dead, but iridescent butterflies, my photographs show life in some of the world’s most polluted areas, near Baku, where I was born and grew up. In my mind, the contrasting images gravitate towards each other – as I have to my father. Since working on this book I have gotten to know him much better than when he was alive. Salty Waters is the translation from Persian of the “Ab-sheuran” Peninsula; in and around Baku, its main city, the earth is breathing with petroleum fumes, as oil oozes to the surface, turning it liquid. The Caspian Sea hugs the eagle-beak shaped land, salting its gas-pocked soil.

 

Rena-Effendi-Liquid-Land-8

 

I photograph the barren, liquid land of Absheron – its environmental and urban decay, its people living amidst the chaos of industrial pollution. My father’s work was in the fresh mountain air. The butterflies that he hunted since he was a boy are spectacular in their symmetry. Carefully placed on plants, they shine with vibrant colours, yet he had to kill each one of them for a picture, piercing his microscopic pins through them.”

 

Design: MV LevievanderMeer, Amsterdam

ISBN 978 90 5330 789 2

Format: 17 x 24 cm (portrait)
Hardbound
112 pages with approx.

Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam

Photography

 

Related Posts

Andrew Miksys: DISKO

Lithuania – For ten years Andrew Miksys traveled the back roads of Lithuania photographing teenagers in village discos. Most of …

Zun Lee: Father Figure – Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood

USA –  Widely hailed as a landmark project, Photography feature – Zun Lee’s monograph is at once documentary photography and …

Daisuke Yokota: Vertigo

Japan –   In 2011, his self published artist book “Back Yard” had great feedback and dramatic diffusion. Start by …

Tom Hunter: Life on the Road

United Kingdom –  Life on the Road captures a remarkable moment in time, in the 1990s, when young people travelled …

Bernard Faucon: Chambers of Gold, 1987-1989

France – In 1987, I went to Japan for the second time. I came back dizzy with the gold and …

Tiane Doan na Champassak: Kolkata

India –  August, 1943. Night is falling on Calcutta, silencing its flocks of ravens, but wakening another kind of life …

Desapelo : Sofia Lopez Mañan

Argentina – I started shaving my head in June last year in an internal process of healing and letting go …

Manik Katyal on Ying Ang “Gold Coast”

Australia –  “I was introduced to Photography feature – Ying‘s work in 2012 at an informal talk at Angkor Photo …

Awoiska van der Molen: “Sequester” – Photographic Meditation of Volcanic Landscape in Canary Islands

Netherlands – I stay in places, locations far from the outside world. Being in this world -and the long time …