8 Years in Azerbaijan

I never expected to spend 8 years in Azerbaijan, a country I knew little about prior to arriving in 2014 in search of little more than an adventure. I'd been offered a job in a start-up tutoring company and, in the absence of any better options at the time, I seized the opportunity. 

I vividly recall stepping off the plane in late May into the already thick Baku air, tinged with its characteristic whiff of oil, and over roughly the next four months I sweated profusely while trying to get to grips with a chaotic job and an initially unfathomable surrounding culture.

But gradually things improved, particularly after I switched jobs to become the editor of a small English-language magazine, which allowed me to travel freely around the country, including its remotest places - often stunningly set mountain villages inhabited by only a dozen or so people. 

As I became more involved, I began to study the language and read about Azerbaijan voraciously. I enjoyed sipping endless glasses of tea in simple teahouses, taking Lada Zhiguli taxis between local towns and villages, hiking through both the Lesser and Greater Caucasus Mountains, and the novelty of visiting Azerbaijan's naturally beautiful exclave, Nakhchivan.

And so, intrigued by all I was learning, I stayed for one year after another. Although, there was another reason for doing so – photography, because it was while in the ‘Land of Fire’ that I really found my passion for it, as a means of communicating my observations and experiences. In the early years, I pursued a part-time Masters in documentary photography and photojournalism, and since then my style has evolved into a sort of slow-travel street photography. 

I am not so much looking to tell stories as to reflect a sense of place, culture, people and atmosphere. I hope these photos manage to do that for Azerbaijan, a country that unexpectedly revealed itself to me. I enjoy looking back at them every now and then and remembering those years of freedom I had to wander at will around a little-known, enigmatic nation occupying a fascinating place in the world, wedged between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains.