Azerbaijan. Caspian sea. 1997
On this particular day, her tears flew on her bruised face and her voice, sometimes soft, strident also, was like a never-ending litany. I can still hear her lament that surprised me amidst the desperation of that fores t of rusted iron, in which I was trying to make my way among abandoned junk cars, trash cans left by man, flocks of hungry goats led by an old silent and bent over shepherd, pieces of plastic twirling in the wind, and dry tall grass. I was looking for an image to capture knowing that another one might surprise me. Behind the creaking of the few operating wells, I imagined the regular dance of those steel horses that, at the dawn of the century, pumped the black gold from Azerbaijan's generous soil profiting to the well-off families of this world. That was before the long Soviet years paralyzed an activity that was very productive at the time. In this exodus, running from the war against Armenia, she had found refuge at Baku’s doors, in a hut in ruins, forgotten in what looked like nothing. On this particular day, despair was stronger than this effort to survive. A 65-year-old lady, she was crying like a child, her little part of land polluted by oil, where nothing was growing.