Rena Effendi

In 40 years of dedicated research my father Rustam Effendi, a dissident and entomologist specializing in butterflies, hunted, classified, and encased in glass boxes over 90,000 butterfly species from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Today, his butterfly collection, inherited by the Republic of Azerbaijan and sadly neglected or sold, has turned to dust, and the only surviving evidence of his life’s work are 50 photographs of endangered butterflies—taken for a book that was never published.

Oil Village pairs my father’s pictures of the fragile perfection of these endangered butterflies with my own pictures of the people and lands affected by the oil industry in Azerbaijan—where the oil boom has resulted in the concentration of nearly half of the country’s population in and around its capital of Baku. Lack of environmental stewardship, corruption, and governmental negligence have combined with industrial and petroleum-related production to create an environmental catastrophe. Due to overpopulation, urban decay, and a lack of social services, Baku has been named by some as the most polluted city in the world. Though recent investments by the government have brought parks and fountains to cities and villages everywhere in the country, access to potable water, reliable electricity, and decent health and education services is still a challenge.

My photographs tell stories of communities living dangerously among this industrial ruin, trapped in difficult circumstances and without any benefit from the oil which still contaminates the land on which they live. The people I have been photographing live on the edges of cities, of poverty, and of life, far from the extreme wealth of those who profit from the oil revenues. They live in makeshift homes, unfinished buildings, oil fields, and abandoned factories. Many of them escaped the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the contested region of Nagorno–Karabakh and are likely to have come from vulnerable rural populations that lost everything and fled to the city in search of safety and work. Although they are no longer living in villages, they still breed chickens among the metal waste of factories and hang their laundry on oil rigs. Two decades later, they continue to endure inhuman conditions: the air they breathe, the water they drink, the playgrounds for their children are contaminated and hostile. Yet life goes on in this dangerous urban concoction—a boy plays his drum on a heap of construction waste, a man takes an oil bath as a form of therapeutic treatment, and a woman is expecting a child in her cardboard home.

Oil Village aims to promote dignity in an undignified world, where corruption eats the benefits most needed and deserved by some of Azerbaijan’s most vulnerable citizens. This project—about hopelessness and resilience, suffering and regeneration—resonates on a personal, community, national, and global level. In my time working with these communities, I have witnessed that in spite of all possible forms of rejection, the human spirit has the resilience of metal and the lightness of a butterfly. 

—Rena Effendi, November 2011