Rena Effendi is one of the world’s most promising young photographers, the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, including the Fifty Crows Documentary Photography Foundation, the Prince Claus Foundation, and the Magnum Foundation. Rena Effendi was shortlisted as a finalist for the 2012 Sony World Photography Awards in February.
Rena
Affendi
was born in 1977 in Baku. After graduating from the Azerbaijan State Institute of Foreign Languages she worked as a translator. She had a passion for painting, which led her to photography. According to Larissa Greenberg, art-director of Gallery Photographer, Rena Effendi’s photos continue the line of one of the most important directions in documentary photography – humanistic.
In 2007 the American magazine Photo District News included Rena Effendi in its list of 30 most outstanding photographers of the world.
In 2009, Rena Effendi’s book “Lifeline. A Chronicle of Unfulfilled Hopes was published in four languages.
Rena Effendi flew to New York for the opening of “Dialectics of the Outsider: Iran” exhibition at Grinberg Gallery Photographer .
An hour before the opening. Rena just got back from the airport.
I asked how it flew, how it survives the New York cold
. Rena guffaws:
– That’s fine. It’s not my first time in New York, I’ve warmed up: a down coat, an earflaps.
– Why Cairo??
– My husband’s place of work, he’s American, works for a humanitarian organization, its office is in Cairo.
– The place is not very quiet..
– Well, turbulent, and where’s the calm now? I don’t take my two year old daughter into the thick of things. If I go myself, I always go cautiously.
– How long have you lived in Egypt??
– Almost a year. Trying to learn Arabic. You can learn it if you practice it all the time, you need time, and I travel a lot. Now she has taken a course three times a week. The instructor speaks neither American nor English, only Arabic. It forces me to concentrate and make efforts – inhuman ones
– Tell us about your photography teacher, I think his name is Sanan Aleskerov?
– Yeah. I didn’t know much about photography when I went to see Sanan. I had a purely utilitarian notion of it: take a picture, put it in a scrapbook, show it to friends. I did not think about the fact that it has artistically expressive means. I came with naïve notions, but with a desire to express myself through photography.
He showed me books by different photographers. Somehow I was immediately drawn to social humanist photography I liked the work of Diane Arbus, Marie Ellen Mark, Robert Frank. Sanan, on the other hand, was interested in staged art photography, less social, more beautiful. But I was lucky: Sanan did not impose his opinion on his students, on the contrary, he supported their chosen direction, promoting and developing us. He gave me materials and books on documentary photography.
That’s his merit as a teacher, he gave you complete freedom and at the same time inspired you to work. He critiqued our work, explained it, gave advice. I went to his studio for a year and a half, and during that time I didn’t even really shoot a single still-life. One day he put the light on and asked me to take the bottles off. I tried – it did not work out well, but I absolutely understood that it is NOT mine. I didn’t like doing a portrait in the studio either. I was more drawn to the outdoors.
– Last year you celebrated the first decade of your career in photography. What I have achieved?
– I think I’ve managed in this time to get to the point where I can work independently and independently. I don’t have a photographic education, I don’t have much experience, I got into photography by chance.
Usually photographers get their first five years of education. I didn’t have such an opportunity. I was working somewhere else and I was doing something far removed from photography. I took up photography in 2001, and in 2005 I was able to quit my job and work fulltime as a photographer.
– What I had to give up?
– From a steady monthly income and a prestigious job. I don’t regret it one bit. It was the right move of my life, even if it had its risks and fears. I’ve been preparing for that for three years. I wanted to leave and never did, then I made up my mind and never looked back.
– This decade includes the “Lifeline” project, your recognition as a notable photographer of the world in 2007, one of 30?
– Yes, there are photos in this project which I took having another job and not being a professional photographer.
– You were not afraid? You weren’t afraid?
– In Azerbaijan I was shooting alone, in Turkey with a fixer, in Georgia partly with a fixer, partly on my own. No, I wasn’t afraid of it. I knew where I was going and why I was going. These are not criminal neighborhoods, these are ordinary people, ordinary life, provincial towns.
The boy from Balakhany. Azerbaijan. 2003. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
– Do you have a relationship with any of your characters??
– No, it’s complicated. In the places where I was shooting, there’s often not even a phone connection, let alone the Internet! Remote villages, remote communities, bad roads.
– Not thinking about going back after a while and seeing what’s changed?
– It would be interesting to see. You don’t have to take a picture, but just drive by and see what it looks like now.
– How does it feel to be among the thirty most famous photographers in the world?? When you found out about it, what was your experience??
– It was a pleasure! Recognition helps with work, you are heard of, known about, and remembered more often when something needs to be done. More suggestions. I like what I do so far, and I do it naturally, without thinking about meeting this year’s plan or keeping the bar.
– How do you think about the next decade, what are you planning??
– I hadn’t really thought about it. I’m not in the habit of making plans. I’m kind of adrift. Wherever it takes me, that’s where I swim.
Rena laughs, and so do I, understanding the absurdity of my question about our rapidly changing world. Rena adds:
– Today I’m in Cairo. I arrived there, I live there and I have no idea where I’ll end up in a year… In the future I want to develop not only a career in journalism and doing stories, but also to move further in the artistic direction. Documentary photography is in demand on the art market and divisions are practically non-existent. I’d like to do more exhibitions, publish books.
– What’s your favorite artists??
– The Dutch – Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch. Renaissance Artists. Cézanne, Matisse. When I was a kid, my board book was the Louvre catalog of paintings. I also loved scary movies, horror movies, reading medical encyclopedias and Edgar Poe.
We interrupt the interview and go to the opening of the exhibition. The next day we meet Rena again, and I ask her again about the first decade of her artistic career. I’m interested in the people who have helped her.
– I don’t even know where to start,” Rena says, “a voluminous question. I’ll start with those who helped me in America. Lisa Factor, Anna Zekria, Larissa Greenberg. These are the main people who have supported me over the years. Larisa Grinberg, Vladimir Dudchenko, Grinberg Gallery support so far. There is a very large team of people abroad. How not to forget someone..
– Maybe start with the organizations?
– Yes, first of all, the agency I’ve been working with since 2009, it’s called the Institute for Artist Management INSTITUTE . It was created by Americans Lauren Greenfield, she is a famous photographer and filmmaker, and her husband Frank Evers, former director of Agency VII. The executive director of INSTUTUTUTE is Matt Schonfeld. They’ve assembled a group of very good photographers and support us in every way possible. I enjoy working in such a creative group.
– What is the support??
– The agency sells our work, “promotes,” and finds commissions. Photograhper agency represents me in America, INSTITUTE represents me worldwide.
Rena takes a moment to reflect, as if she were mentally transported back in time.
– Lots of people, lots of happy memories. The first thing that gave me the strength to believe in myself was a grant from the Fifty Crows International Documentary Photography Foundation for my first mahalla story. My first international prize and first photography money. Once I got them, I believed that I could make it through, and I went into photography.
And business picked up immediately. I went to Joop Swart’s workshop at World Press Photo. Received Getty Images Editorial Grant – $20,000 – for the “Lifeline” photography project. I had already filmed a story on Azerbaijan, and I asked for a grant to continue filming the whole perimeter of the oil pipeline.
The grant allowed me to complete the project and was important in my career. My mom calmed down and accepted my choice of profession. I was also helped by the photographer Stanley Greene who came to Baku in 2006. We worked together, I was his assistant and fixer on trips to Azerbaijan. Stanley advised the director of the Perpignan Photographic Festival, François Leroy, to do my exhibition.
– How the World Press Photo master class was held and what it gave me?
– Very active! We were engaged in a photographic rhythm, from 9 in the morning until 2 in the morning. We talked about photography non-stop. Twelve students and seven teachers for seven days. A group of passionate people obsessed with photography got together and the air around it started to crack..
Our group included professional photographers who already had experience working with magazines, publishers and agencies. I was an exception, for me everything was just beginning. I wasn’t published anywhere, I didn’t know what the magazine industry was. The communication with the teachers and more experienced colleagues was very important.
– And what did you do after the master class??
– I went to New York to meet the photo editors of all the magazines in America. Acquainted. Taking part in the master class helped a lot. After writing to Simon Norfolk, who was one of seven teachers at the workshop, I went to New York and now I have ideas for stories to tell.
He replied that it’s usually the other way around: the photographer does the stories and goes to New York to offer them. But it was interesting to learn and understand how the magazine industry works. A year later, Newsweek America gave me an assignment to shoot a story for the cover.
In 2009 her book “Life Line” was published in four languages: American, English, German, and Spanish.
– Speaking of the book,” adds Rena, “I am grateful to publishers Martin Schilt and Leonid Gusev. They believed in me, supported me and invested in publishing the book. Time and money. The book was published in 4,000 copies and is sold all over the world. Last year I got a prize from the Prince Claus Foundation in Holland. The Foundation supports cultural projects all over the world and every year it selects 11 laureates from different cultural fields.
– So this prize can be seen as recognition of a contribution to world culture?
– Yeah! It’s very important for me, as it goes beyond photography to another general cultural level. The prize is very prestigious, it was established by the royal family of Holland.
– How did the Life Line project get started??
– From shooting a mahalla, a small neighborhood in Baku, which was near my house and was demolished. It was my first street story. It was included in the book “Lifeline” as a separate chapter, and it’s important to me because it’s my first documentary story. It’s a story. When you first start taking photos, you make beautiful images, but they exist separately, each on their own.
“Lifeline” is my first focused story. I understood how a photographic story is composed, the elements and structure. In fact, I came to this quite quickly, because from the very beginning I did not take individual photographs, but tried to mentally combine them into a narrative. I wasn’t interested in shooting individual frames.
– How do you know the story’s been told??
– It’s a very difficult question. It’s actually a subconscious feeling. There comes a moment when I go out and realize that my intuition which always led me and told me where to go, where to turn, what to do has disappeared. There’s an emptiness inside and I realize that I’ve already filmed everything. It doesn’t matter if it’s a street story, or a city story, or a country story.
When you come here you realize: everything is over in this place. Probably another photographer will continue to shoot, but I have this. Everything is purely subconscious and emotional, it has no intellectual justification. In my book, the last frame is really the last frame of my journey along the oil pipeline. This is a crumpled map of Turkey, taken in an abandoned school in the last village of my route. This shot was very symbolic for me. I realized that the story is finished.
– How have you changed over this decade??
– The major turning point is the transition from black and white photography to color. I started out purely as a black and white photographer, a project that took a lot of energy, energy and time. I did something parallel to the color, but not much. In 2006 I went to Hanalyk village where I started to shoot with color. After that, I “burst.”. I realized that color is important to me.
– What does color mean to you?? Your pictures are so vivid and saturated..
– In fact, every story has a different color scheme. Hanalyk is lively, open, natural colors: red, yellow, blue, green. There’s a warmth that comes from them. Let’s take another story, “The House of Happiness”: here, the colors are false colors, technical colors. And that’s their power of attraction. And that’s what history is all about.
Everything is fake, everything is showing off. The falsity of the façade. Plastic pink, plastic blue… Let’s see the Chernobyl story. Here is also natural color, but not as bright as in Hanalyk, but more pastoral, more picturesque, very calm. A very different sense of color. History and place dictate their color scheme. It’s not my vision. It’s more my interpretation of the real color.
– Is it difficult to be a woman photographer??
– I don’t know. It’s my nature: I always focus on the positive. There’s a lot of positive things about being a woman. First of all, women are easier to photograph, they’re not afraid of them. Always offering help. In some countries, it’s easier for a woman to enter a woman’s world.
And in the men’s one, it’s not hard either. I could, for example, easily find myself in the showers of miners in America, or go into some women’s rooms where men are not allowed. This moment of access is an important one, it is much easier for a woman. The only thing that’s helped me so far is that I’m a woman. In both work and advancement. In an extreme situation, too.
– How do you find topics for your projects? You are not interested in the happy and the rich?
– It’s actually a cliché: the happy rich and the unhappy poor. I am more interested in the phenomenon of human adaptation to any conditions. I am interested in making stories about people who have a certain strength of character.
Character grows in difficult conditions. I found this one the most interesting. I don’t get the story only on economic or social grounds. I am more interested in the less accessible, closed layers. In Iran for example I shot Tehran elite.
– Your attitude to glossy photography?
– There is a good glossy, good authors, and the average glossy is boring, not interesting. I worked for Italian Vogue, I shot portraits of the artists of the Venice Biennale, but I shot in my own style. It’s not necessarily that glossy magazines commission glossy photography. They often order a journalistic picture.
A story about the situation of women in Kyrgyzstan was published in Marie Claire and made quite a splash. From recent shootings, two of the most interesting assignments were from American Women’s More – about the women of Chernobyl, and about a woman in Thailand who saved 39 elephants!
– What do you think a photographic education should be?
– Depends on the type of person. Some like to learn from life, some like to sit in class. But there should be more practice. Now we have internet, we have access to everything. From 2002 to 2005 I lived in a kind of vacuum. There were three or four people in Baku to whom I could show my pictures. In spite of this, I took the photos that were included in the book.
– Who are your parents and what is most important for you in your life??
– Family and work. Family Work. On the same level. I hope I don’t have to choose. As long as I manage to balance. Mother is a philologist. A practical person, one might say, down-to-earth. It has helped me a lot, instilled in me a trait which can be conventionally called “not to deviate from reality”.
Dad is a biologist, entomologist, more creative person, traveled through the Caucasus and Pamir and collected ninety thousand butterflies in forty years. He was obsessed with his work. I want to publish a book — his butterflies and my photos. But this is a separate project and a separate talk.
Old oil fields. Balakhani. Azerbaijan, 2010. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
Mountain dweller on horseback, June 2006. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
A woman bakes bread in a tandoor, June 2006. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
Mirror in front of unfinished house. Bibi-Heybat, Azerbaijan. 2005. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
The owner of a shooting range in the park. g.Osh. Kyrgystan. 2007. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
Gulia. A young Uzbek woman. 2007. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
Rena Effendi. A family waiting for a wedding party. Osh, 2007. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery
Sister-in-law at home. Khinalig village. Azerbaijan, 2006. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery
From “House of happiness” series, 2007. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
Bride in bedroom. The village of Khinalig. Azerbaijan, 2009. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
Boy with maps. Mahalla. Baku. Azerbaijan. 2003. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
A girl covered in “glitter” after a holiday. Tbilisi. Georgia. 2006. Courtesy of Grinberg Gallery.
How does the history and location of Rena Effendi Gallery impact the choice of color scheme?