Baku is an amazing place where a person like Rena Effendi can live and create relatively undisturbed by the forces of a consumerist society. This combined with her easy-going personality make it easy to seek her out. The photographs and the controversy surrounding Rena’s work will pique anyone’s curiosity. When somebody pointed her out to me at a party I did not hesitate to ask for an interview.
It would be another two months before we sit down to talk. Having recently become a mother, she felt compelled to postpone or cancel more important and exciting things in her career. I felt lucky when in the first week of January Rena invited me to her home. There, amid human-size paintings by the Mirjavadovs (husband and wife), she talked about her dreams and photographic language.
Hunter
There are people who are incredibly talented. Their talent fills them to the brim and overflows for the benefit of culture and science. It is something of a subconscious process that is difficult to formalize and therefore impossible to emulate. Rena has a different kind of talent that emerged over time through persistence, trial and error, and hard-work. She is a great role model because her story is that of a self-made woman, a go-getter, and an entrepreneur. She does not claim to have been born with a camera in her hands. For a while Rena struggled with painting but could never sit still for long enough. “It’s my frustration with the brush that led me to photography,” she admits. “I had a dream. I had something in me. I wanted to express myself.”
Before she found “where her heart belonged”, Rena graduated from university as a teacher of English and worked for the US Embassy and USAID in Baku. Of course she could not remain immune to the transformations that were taking place in her environment. There was a new country and her city was putting on a different face. She took lessons learning to depict real life and real people in their natural state Like a hunter in the woods she roamed the streets of old neighborhoods, aiming to capture the perfect moment on her camera. Yet she wanted more, something to make her voice more pronounced. Deeply affected by the clues to the stories suggested by the street, Rena gradually transitioned into social documentary photography. She worked on her message and refined it to be easily understood by the viewer.
Risk-taker
In 2005 Rena quit her full-time well-paying job as economic development specialist to become a professional photographer. “I had no choice. I was going crazy.” She remembers the tedious office hours, the lack of freedom and the constant desire to be outside. An escape route from her dual lifestyle presented itself after Rena became the winner of the Fifty Crows International Fund for Documentary Photography competition. This brought her work into the public and media eye. A series of other prestigious awards and exhibitions all over the world followed. “Opportunities fall into my hands,” says Rena in response to a question about how she manages and promotes her projects. Today Rena is a member of the Institute for Artist Management, an internationally recognized photo agency, and has exhibited at the Venice and Istanbul biennials.
Rena’s frank photographic essays have not made her a favorite with one or two governments in the region. Her latest series of work Pipe Dreams, released as a book, unravels the oil history of Azerbaijan. It shows the by-products of wealth and conflict, the construction boom, the expat invasion, the trauma of people running from war, and the shattered dreams of those left behind. Rena establishes “a long-term commitment to the subject” of her work. She is absent from the scene but is able to maintain a connection with the people she photographs. This brings her back to the same places and affords the opportunity “to see children grow up”. In Rena’s book “every picture has a story, a face, and a place” but it does not include everyone.
A large part of the Pipe Dreams is dedicated to the account of people’s lives along the pipeline completed in 2005 and running from Baku, Azerbaijan to Ceyhan, Turkey. “Some people were happy as a result but that’s not my story,” says Rena. Her story is “to show the faces of those who suffer, to give them a voice.” Among these people are the families whose houses are situated right next to the pipeline transporting gas to Europe, but who have no gas to cook their meals. “People thought life would change for the better” but as millions of dollars flow past them every day, they struggle to survive. Many of them are refugees who fled conflict and now form part of the “nation within a nation.”
Work and personal interest took her outside of Azerbaijan to places like Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, and Kyrgyzstan. I ask her whether she is ever afraid of travelling alone. “I’m worried before I get on the plane but fear dissipates when you get to a place. You are always working with people and you are not afraid.” Rena takes calculated risks and never runs “headlong into a crazy situation.” In some ways being a woman helps because she is perceived to be less threatening than a man. Rena is often invited into people’s homes, where she gets unique insight into the lives of ordinary families. “Today a woman can take on any job. I’ve seen women-miners in Siberia,” she says. “People think it must be difficult to be a woman photographer. They are trying to be nice. ”
Communicator
While Rena does not necessarily cover gender issues in her work, she is not indifferent to the situation of women in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The series House of Happiness examines “the façade of happiness through the institution of marriage.” Here Rena also chooses to tell the story of the outsiders, the divorcees turned drug-addicts, who used to be wives. Her narrative is about women brought up to serve men but later abandoned by their husbands and socially stigmatized. She gains access to a brothel and captures the plight of prostitutes and their offspring.
“You learn as you work. We change with the years, molding into different shapes and forms,” she comments on her technique. “Every story I make is different in terms of style. I choose different languages.” Often the subject itself may guide Rena in her work but she never stops looking. She has an unrelenting connection with the world and the urge to bring the faces of those on its fringes into focus. It takes character to come one-on-one with the pain and poverty that many of us make an effort to ignore. It takes guts to confront those who choose to create a distorted representation of reality. It takes hard work to transform a massive body of content into a narrative.
Today Rena can afford to pursue her dream of a life dedicated to photography. She took time to define her strengths, learned new skills, took risks, and connected with people. But most importantly she believed in herself and her ability to succeed. In the end her art covered her like a wave. When I ask her what kind of advice she can give to those women who are still in the process of self-discovery, she smiles and says: “Keep looking. You could end up a professional dilettante but at least you would’ve had an interesting life trying different things.”
