A portly man stands covered in glistening crude oil: this visual joke on that iconic scene from Goldfinger sets the scene for British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews’s exploration of life in post-Soviet Central Asia.
This week, she won an international photography award for a series on Naftalan, Azerbaijan, and its crude oil spa treatments.
Equally great is her work on the dying Aral Sea.
The photographs are quiet and humane, ironic yet forgiving. But what I liked most about them is the lingering sense of the Soviet in each one.
Not just the artifacts of that old life: radiators, bath-tubs, ZIL trucks and ladas, kiosks with faded stencilled cyrillic signs for Pepsi, slanted wire frames of abandoned playground equipment, an old mosaic of Lenin, a flowery vinyl tablecloth etc.
What I found most intriguing were the photos that show the “new” Azerbaijan; specifically one where a group of workers are installing a giant, gaudy mausoleum for a rich man from the oil industry.
In the middle of the ostentatious, turreted, vaguely oriental structure is a simple black marble plaque with a grey etched portrait – the kind of plaque that graces virtually every Soviet gravestone.
Was there every such a thing as the Soviet civilisation? Who can say?
But it’s interesting to think that, no matter how much borders, ideologies and lifestyles change, and how much money that man may have made over the last 20 years, in the end he was born, and died, a Soviet.
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