Baku Mirages

Held in conjunction with the Fashion and Style in Photography festival and the Days of Azeri Culture in Moscow, the exhibition gives a peek at the country's nascent photography culture, where practitioners still have room to grow in terms of technique but seem willing and eager to learn and experiment.

Opportunities for photographers and artists to develop their craft may be limited in Baku, but they do exist. Leila Akhund-Zade, the exhibition's curator, wrote in an e-mail that that many of the featured photographers were members of "Wings of Time," an association that works in contemporary art, and that students can study photography at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts.

Not everyone is so optimistic. "There are several institutions in Azerbaijan that offer an art education, but photography is either not taught there at all, or only superficially," wrote Rena Effendi, a news photographer and a recipient of a Getty Images Editorial Photography Grant in 2006. She added that it was hard to work with the Azeri media because pro-government publications have a very narrow range of subjects, opposition papers do not have the funding to pay photographers, and tabloids and entertainment publications are uninterested in high-quality photography.

Nonetheless, the scene is developing. "Interest in photography is very high," Akhund-Zade wrote. "Perhaps because photography is a more democratic and accessible art form."

Art in Azerbaijan seems set to follow the path it took in Moscow, where the Moscow House of Photography (the organizer of the Fashion and Style in Photography festival) started out 10 years ago by showcasing a medium with broad appeal and grew into a powerful force in the contemporary art world. Like Moscow, Baku now has an international photography festival; Akhund-Zade said it would be held for the second time in May.

Most of the photographers represented at "Contemporary Azeri Photography" work with digital technology, sometimes using Photoshop and other computer techniques to reflect the medium of photography itself. Ainur Aliyeva's series "Cheese" turns the lens on obsolete analogue equipment, while Fakhriya Mamedova toys with mirrored images of mannequins. Other artists exploit the visual environment of their native Azerbaijan -- the Caspian shore, decaying buildings, oil fields and Muslim imagery -- and the results tend to be fresher and more interesting.

Orkhan Aslanov combines archaic images from his surroundings with contemporary digital manipulation. "Dreaming of Disappearing" suggests a feeling of longing by cutting the rear view of a figure standing in a dilapidated gateway with a panorama of a vast, empty desert. In the colorful collage "I Want Some Clouds," photographs of plump white clouds hang to dry on a clothesline against a clear and heavy sky.

Aslanov's works are the most seamless and imaginative, but they are not the only ones that use this combination of technique and imagery. Akhund-Zade's series "Quest for Harmony" puts colorful photographs of old women hawking fruits and vegetables against hilly backgrounds, digitally painted and saturated with color. In "Oil," Farad Khairulin made a vivid landscape by enhancing the green color of brushy shrubs on a brackish oil field and painting the water red.

Often, the straightforward documentary photographs at the exhibition are more compelling. Standouts include Chingiz Samed-Zade's composition of a simple white house with three black caps hanging by the door, and Effendi's "Fisherman. Oilers' Settlement Bibi-Eibat," which depicts an old man and his fishing equipment against the backdrop of seawater and oil derricks.

"The theme of Azeri identity has haunted me for a long time," Effendi wrote. "In my work I strive to find images that can break free from the shell of individual pain and evoke compassion, turning into a tool for responding to all possible human collisions."

By Brian Droitcour

/The Moscow Times/