Strewn relics, crumbling walls

Years ago, my friend Rachel - who, unlike myself, is a real photographer with excellent eyesight, ergo can take pictures that are actually in focus - produced a group of photographs which came to be fondly known as the dead animal series. These images included carcasses of roadkill, bones from dessicated desert creatures and other remnants of animal life in varying stages of decay. What i always found profound about them was the window each photo opened into my imagination of the animal's demise: how it collapsed to the ground or crawled off into the woods to die, the invasion of detritivores, the final stretching or contraction of muscles. Then the fast forward, back of the eyelids flickering that brought a body through its loss of flesh to the bare, clean-washed skeleton seen in the photo.

The other day i went to out to the Absheron peninsula, which brought Rachel's photos to mind in that so much of what one sees there seems to be the decaying relics of the Soviet era and oil industry, what still remains from the heyday of 'peace, bread and work'. As Lenin famously remarked, "fascism is capitalism in decay," and apparently he and his political descendants were intent on proving this to be true. What is perhaps most interesting is the extent to which life simply goes on with the rusty equipment, decaying walls and shaky gas lines. It's not the same as walking through an exclusion zone, yet there is a grimy, cynical sadness about this environment which i find oddly captivating.

Rusted out, often abandoned pump jacks pop up from the flatlands in every direction. It's hard to imagine how anyone could psychologically acclimate to living in a virtual forest of these grinding praying manthises: it's not the mechanical nature of them that disturbs the senses so much as the hardened pools of tar at their bases, the incredible proximity to people's homes, the utterly intense indifference conveyed by repetitive up and down motion or the immobility of lengthy disuse. This detritus from the oil industry works as an oxymoronic magnet, something so shocking at this scale that i simultaneously feel a deep revulsion and a morbid desire to see how disgusting it can actually get. Petroleum is a dirty industry, we all know this to be true. Seeing this side of it - a place where people feel proud of their country's contribution to the global petrol market and are inured to the quality of life costs because that's simply how it needs to be done - i'm left wondering if it's really fair to sneer at all the massive SUVs clogging the streets of Baku. That is to say, having already irreparably trashed the land they live on, does it make sense to suddenly care about energy conservation and auto efficiency?

Outside the town of Suvelen, i encountered a cemetery that overlooks a large seaside refinery and has clearly changed hands from red star era Russian Orthodox to a glittery, we-wish-this-were-Shiraz Shia Islam. At the top of the hill are the weathered Russian gravesites. Again, that feeling of decay and abandonment, of a place which once held meaning being left to the elements. Not sorrowful, but lost. Small monuments to those who came before, intact out of respect or indifference - who can say? They stand as relics of a time people clearly want to put behind them. Fenced and overgrown, dotted by the occasional, inert pump jack (yes, in the middle of a cemetery, when it comes to oil no ground is that sacred), the only flowers at these graves are those growing out of the earth, eventually sure to envelop them. Walls fall, fences collapse. The decay of their relics does not, per force, imply the decay of the people.