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Otherworldly Photos of Azerbaijan Reveal Daily Life in a Haunted Wasteland

By Alyssa Coppelman on March 5, 2014

Cairo-based photographer Rena Effendi’s Liquid Land depicts communities living in the polluted lands of the Absheron Peninsula in Azerbaijan. Effendi, who just won two prizes in the World Press Photo Awards, was born and raised in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, the same region captured in this series. Effendi says these communities are “pushed to the edges of city and society, they inhabit makeshift homes, oilfields and abandoned factories; their numbers grow, with new children born daily. Many are refugees of war—rural populations that lost everything and fled to the city to be safe and to find work.” Here their daily life is set in a haunted wasteland, where breathing polluted air and drinking contaminated water are commonplace. Otherworldly yet all too real, Liquid Land is a collective portrait of a people enduring the legacies of war and oil, yet still carrying on.

Liquid Land was published by Schilt Publishing in 2013.

Rena Effendi