Private Project
Rena Effendi
When I first started photographing 20 years ago in my home country of Azerbaijan, I embarked on a long term project documenting people who have fallen victims to the resource curse. As a result, I followed a 1,700 km oil pipeline through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, one which maneuvered through a delicate web of social, environmental and political concerns. This work of six years: Pipe Dreams: a Chronicle of Lives along the Pipeline - became my first monograph, which portrayed the human cost of oil, and the price paid by those who lost their farmlands, livelihoods and homes due to rampant corruption and negligence of governments and corporations.
Since then my stories have varied in scope and geography. Most recently I returned home during a flareup of a three decade long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno Karabakh region. More than a million civilians were displaced by this war in the 90s when the conflict unraveled. Last year, I followed families of Azerbaijani refugees returning to the recently recaptured lands to find their homes and towns leveled with systematic destruction during decades of occupation.
Over the past two years, I’ve been documenting a gradual social collapse in Lebanon, as the country grapples with its multiple crisis with a pivotal event of the August 2020 Beirut blast, the single most powerful non-nuclear explosion in human history, at its epicenter.
My first encounter with conflict was in 2008, during the Russia-Georgia war, which I went to cover on spec. A decade later, in the aftermath of civil wars in Congo DRC, Cote d’Ivoire and Central African Republic I documented brave survivors of gender based violence and other crimes against humanity. In spite of their trauma, the individuals I portrayed remain strong and defiant. I encountered the same resilience in the people I met in 2015 during the Syrian refugee crisis, as thousands of families camped outside European borders, waiting for a chance to cross, while harboring hopes for a better future.
While documenting these human stories around the world, often in forgotten, disenfranchised communities, I hope to spotlight such global issues as social marginalization and post-war trauma. My collection of places and portraits of the disempowered and the displaced now spans two decades and does not only show moments of unspoken anguish, but also expresses human dignity and strength. In this sense, my work reflects on humanistic values, such as those seen in the work of Anja Niedringhaus, who had dedicated her life to documenting the human struggle for survival with compassion and respect.
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