amanda rivkin, photographer

Explorers Bio
Amanda Rivkin
Photographer
Young Explorers Grants, Expeditions Council Grant

Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
Current City: Baku, Azerbaijan

What did you want to be when you were growing up?
When I was very small, maybe seven years old, I told my godmother I wanted to be a crane, and when she asked what kind of crane, I said an operating crane like on a construction site. As a teenager, I thought I would be a writer, which is what led me to go to the college I eventually went to, Sarah Lawrence College, although I waited until the last possible moment of my senior year to take a writing class, because the curriculum itself was designed for writers, with no exams and independent research projects to complement the work in every course. This is what led me to journalism school, where I discovered by wonderful accident my true passion, photography.

How did you get started in your field of work?
I was studying print journalism at Columbia University when I enrolled in a short course mainly for writers who would be asked to take an occasional picture for their publications. I do not think I ever put down a camera after that.

What inspires you to dedicate your life to photography?
There are a ton of ups and downs in photojournalism and life generally, and the pay, especially when you are starting out, is often meager, but the strangest things keep me going. I remember being at the Visa Pour L’image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France, for the first time this year and there is one café where everyone goes to drink in the evening, Café de la Poste, and often this group includes some of the world’s finest conflict photographers. This café is in a square named after one of the bloodiest battles in history, certainly in Europe: Place de la Verdun, where 300,000 men lost their lives in a senseless war of attrition that lasted 11 months in 1916, during the Great War, the war to end all wars. I wonder how many people at Café de la Poste know this history and so for me such small examples of an ironic and ephemeral value continuously serve to remind me of the value of photography. Even if we allow ourselves as humans and nations to make the same mistakes, we should at least have a record and knowledge so that if we look the other way on lessons of the past, it is our decision and something we or others can return to later to study and grow from. I have come to see photography maybe in the vein of ancient epics, for a good photo is crafted like poetry.

What’s a normal day like for you?
A normal day is hard to define! I love shooting news photography. I love the adrenalin of racing someplace, the competition of trying to make the best picture and file before the other photographers. But I also love the quieter assignments and projects that allow for a longer time to meditate on a certain topic and gather research and that work far more as a choose-your-own-adventure, within the confines of the selected story of course! If I can, I start the day with a shower and a cup of coffee or tea, but if I am someplace strange or rural where this is not possible, then I go without. If I can, I like to read or research late into the night.

Do you have a hero?
I have so many people I consider inspirational but the word “hero” scares people, especially the living and particularly me I think! When I was younger, it was the work of poets and musicians that inspired me greatly, singers and songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs and the poetry of Federico García Lorca, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire.

In photography, I am drawn to people who have produced work over a long period of time that I think has an almost epic depth to it: Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Gilles Peress, James Nachtwey, Lynsey Addario, but I feel like I am not naming every one!

Politically I am drawn to those individuals whose ambitions were revealed over the course of a long, moral struggle but who personally never sought power, men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Adam Michnik, a former student agitator, later imprisoned by the communists in Poland who created and remains editor to this day of the first free and independent newspaper after the transition in 1989, Gazeta Wyborcza.

What has been your favorite experience in the field? The most challenging?
My favorite experience to date in the field was on my National Geographic Young Explorers Grant when I had a peculiar dream come true of visiting and photographing Azerbaijan’s offshore oil fields in the Caspian, where the earliest oil discoveries were made in the 19th century and where oil is still pumped to this day. Having grown up during the very twilight years of the Soviet Union in America, it felt like the very definition of forbidden. The most challenging moments for me always come with keeping my composure to work when I am confronted with something that is just egregiously wrong. Sometimes I can hold it together long enough to get home and other times I end up crying alongside the people I am photographing.

What are your other passions?
I love cooking and literature, theater, and art.

What do you do in your free time?
What free time? Most of my free time is spent reading and researching but also looking at creative works in other fields like literature, theater, and art to inspire my own.

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Related:
“At Five Years Old, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture,” National Geographic News (June 8, 2011).

While attending the World Youth Festival, sponsored by the pro-government Yeni Azerbaycan Partiyasi (New Azerbaijan Party) youth organization Ireli, I had a chance to meet Eldar Gasimov and Nigar Camal, better known as Ell + Nikki, winners of the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest hosted in Düsseldorf, Germany. Their victory means Azerbaijan gets to play host to next year’s contest. As a very serious observer of the contest and perhaps most interestingly, the politics surrounding the contest, this was no small thrill.

When Azerbaijan won last May, I was nowhere near Europe or a place to watch the contest, but I knew almost immediately of Azerbaijan’s victory. I had already secured the Fulbright grant to Azerbaijan; my close friends and family who are well aware of my obsession with the Eurovision competition made sure I knew who the victor was. Quite simply, my phone blew up. Several months before I arrived in Baku, I think it was the first sign that I was really on my way to Azerbaijan.

From yesterday’s brief remarks at the opening of the World Youth Festival and the evening concert of “Running Scared” by Ell and Nikki:

Eurovision 2011 winners Ell + Nikki (Nigar Jamal and Eldar Gasimov) at the World Youth Festival on October 15, 2011 in Ganja, Azerbaijan.

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Azerbaijan Eurovision Song Contest Winner 2011 Nigar Jamal in concert on October 15, 2011 in Ganja, Azerbaijan.

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The winning song, “Running Scared”:

Last August, I gave a brief interview to Boyd Matson of National Geographic Weekend Radio on the importance of the Eurovision Song Contest in Azerbaijan, please have a listen.

Party in the Baku!

Watch this video and consider making a contribution to my ongoing, long-term project, please. There are rewards at every step of the way:

For the full project information and pitch on Emphas.Is:

BTC oil pipeline

I first became interested in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in the mid-1990s, when the Clinton White House Special Envoy Bill Richardson and Azerbaijani government were pushing oil companies to build the massive multinational infrastructure project. In the tumultuous post-Cold War period and with the demise of the Soviet Union, major oil companies preferred a more direct and less expensive route through Iran, but American interests prevailed. Oil from the BTC pipeline first reached the port of Ceyhan in southeast Turkey in May of 2006, an event hailed as the greatest geopolitical victory for the West in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Since 9/11, however, the same interests that enthusiastically backed the project initially have now shifted their attention elsewhere — towards the Middle East and South Asia. In the summer of 2010, with the assistance of a Young Explorers Grant from the National Geographic Society, I followed and photographed the pipeline’s 1,100-mile route, which skirts five conflict zones in three countries representing believers of both Islam and Christianity.

That trip was a profound study in contrasts. The money brought in by the oil revenues converted Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, into a wealthy boom town, with elegant cafés, designer shops, and the Caspian seaside promenade, Bulvar. The low-rise old neighborhoods in the center, including large sections of the Besh Mertebe neighborhood where I now live, were being destroyed to build modern high rises. In one village in Georgia, the locals had been given compensation money for the pipeline’s disruption to their agricultural lands, and many had purchased cars. As we drove through, they were literally laying down new pavement.

Photographing and living in the region, I have seen how development can go right and wrong. With such a fragile cohesion in this geopolitical powder keg, it is critical for me to return this winter and visually catalogue the slow evolution of the region around the pipeline. As a backer of this project, you will become a participant in an overlooked but crucial angle of history and help others to develop an understanding of the complicated Eurasian puzzle.

Depending on your particular level of support, you will also be privy to a signed postcard, soft or hardbound book, or a limited edition print from this series. All backers will receive exclusive access to the “making of” zone, which includes regular updates from the field, the region, travel tips, visual notes and insights to the evolution of this project.

Help fund this project.

Today commemorates 17 years since the signing of the “Contract of the Century” to build the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline to deliver offshore Caspian crude from the oil fields of Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli. On this day in 1994, the agreement was signed between the government of Azerbaijan and major oil companies Amoco, BP, McDermott, Unocal, Lukoil, Statoil, Exxon, TPAO, Pennzoil, Itochu, Ramco, Delta and SOCAR (the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijani Republic). The BTC pipeline has the capacity to bring one million barrels of Azeri oil a day to Western markets.

Last year, I first came to Azerbaijan and the region to follow and photograph socioeconomic developments along the pipeline route with a Young Explorers Grant from the National Geographic Society. The work I produced was published, “At Five Years Old: BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture,” and I hope to return to the region to following the route this winter. I will soon be launching on October 1 a crowdsourcing campaign to accomplish this goal on the photojournalists’ fundraising platform Emphas.Is, where I hope to raise $4,250.

Here are some unpublished images from the offshore oil platform Guneshli-4, part of an exclusive look at the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli offshore oil fields, as well as images from the Sangachal Oil Terminal south of Baku, where the BTC pipeline officially begins its 1,100 mile journey towards the southeastern coast of Turkey and the port of Ceyhan:

AZERI-CHIRAG-GUNESHLI:

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The offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields 60 kilometers from the Azeri coast in the Caspian Sea on July 15, 2010; oil from these fields is pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

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Oil workers on Guneshli 4 offshore oil platform in the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields 60 kilometers from the Azeri coast in the Caspian Sea on July 15, 2010; oil from these fields is pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

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A worker in the dormitory building walks down a stairwell beneath a poster of President Ilham Aliyev and his father, Heydar Aliyev, the former president of Azerbaijan, on the Guneshli 4 offshore oil platform in the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields 60 kilometers from the Azeri coast in the Caspian Sea on July 15, 2010.

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Oil workers on Guneshli 4 offshore oil platform in the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields 60 kilometers from the Azeri coast in the Caspian Sea on July 15, 2010; oil from these fields is pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

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Workers on the Guneshli 4 offshore oil platform in the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields 60 kilometers from the Azeri coast in the Caspian Sea on July 15, 2010.

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Oil workers on Guneshli 4 offshore oil platform in the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields 60 kilometers from the Azeri coast in the Caspian Sea on July 15, 2010; oil from these fields is pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

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The Azeri flag flies on Guneshli 4 offshore oil platform in the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields 60 kilometers from the Azeri coast in the Caspian Sea on July 15, 2010; oil from these fields is pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

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SANGAÇAL OIL TERMINAL:

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The Sangachal Terminal, where Azeri crude from the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields is processed and pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 13, 2010.

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The Sangachal Terminal, where Azeri crude from the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields is processed and pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 13, 2010.

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The starting point of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline at the Sangachal Terminal, where Azeri crude from the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields is processed and pumped into the pipeline, in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 13, 2010.

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Private construction contractors the Sangachal Terminal, where Azeri crude from the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields is processed and pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 13, 2010.

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The Sangachal Terminal, where Azeri crude from the offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil fields is processed and pumped into the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 13, 2010.

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To see the fuller, wide edit of my two-month journey along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline route in the summer of 2010, please visit my PhotoShelter site.

Last month when I was in Washington for the Fulbright orientation, I stopped by National Geographic headquarters for a brief interview with Boyd Matson for his National Geographic Weekend radio show. While the clip is not quite yet available online, it did air yesterday on satellite radio and several AM and FM stations across America. You can have a listen here.

Previously I was a guest of the show in early 2010 to discuss my work photographing everyday life and the economic reality facing Cubans in their country after a trip there resulted in several images being published in Foreign Policy.

I received three honorable mentions this year at the Lucie International Photography Awards for work in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Hungary, and Chicago. The entries are below with brief descriptions. You will have to scroll down pretty far in the same “Honorable Mention” gallery to find these entries in the environmental, political, photo essay and feature story categories here.

From the entry description:
Entry Title: “Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline“
Name: Amanda Rivkin, United States
Category: Professional, Photo Essay and Feature Story
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline traverses three nations, skirts five conflict zones, and covers land held by believers in at least two of the world’s great religions. A major post-Cold War victory for the West that sent one million barrels of oil a day pumping from the oil fields of Azerbaijan with room to expand to transport energy from elsewhere in the Caspian and Central Asian regions, the BTC pipeline – as the project is known – has helped to redefine energy security in the early 21st century.
(This work has previously appeared at National Geographic.)

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Entry Title: “Hungary’s Toxic Red Sludge“
Name: Amanda Rivkin, United States
Category: Professional, Environmental
On October 4, 2010, a reservoir containing toxic red alumina sludge in Ajka, Hungary ruptured and resulted in a serious industrial accident affecting numerous surrounding villages. In part, the accident was the result of a much larger region-wide disaster that has resulted from decaying communist-era industry and lack of regulation in the aftermath of the transition to capitalism and a private sector economy following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and communism across the former Eastern bloc. There is no perfect storm man created.
(This work has previously appeared at Bag News Notes.)

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From the entry description:
Entry Title: “Mayor Not Daley: The Rise of Rahm Emanuel in Chicago“
Name: Amanda Rivkin, United States
Category: Professional, Political
When Richard M. Daley announced he would not seek reelection for the office of mayor of Chicago, a position he held for 22 years and a post previously held by his father, Richard J. Daley, an elaborate game of political exchange brought Rahm Emanuel home from Washington to become mayor of Chicago. Formerly the White House Chief of Staff under President Barack Obama, Emanuel left the White House and Richard M. Daley’s brother, Bill Daley, soon took up the job. Emanuel’s close relationship with the president is something many Chicagoans hope the city will benefit from.
(This work has previously appeared at Fortnight Journal.)

Un bagno di petrolio
National Geographic Italia
20 giugno 2011 (June 20, 2011)

Dall’Azerbaigian alla Turchia, passando per la Georgia. L’oleodotto BTC porta verso occidente non solo il greggio. Un fotoracconto tra i popoli e i contrasti del Caucaso lungo la strada del petrolio che fu al centro della scacchiera geopolitica della regione

fotografie di Amanda Rivkin

Immersi nel petrolio
Fotografia di Amanda Rivkin

L’Azerbaigian è noto fin dai tempi di Marco Polo per le sue sorgenti di olio nero. Ha riserve per 1,2 miliardi di barili di greggio. Marianne Lavelle con le sue foto segue il percorso dell’oleodotto BTC (Baku, Tbilisi, Cehuyan) non solo un’enorme infrastruttura energetica, ma un caso geopolitico tra paesi e culture secolari. Vedi su Limes la carta del percorso del BTC. Leggi anche sul blog MappaMundi

Nella foto, Quliyev Jeyyub si rilassa con un bagno nel greggio nella rinomata casa di cura Naftalan, 360 chilometri a ovest di Baku.

La Spa petrolifera, costruita nel 1926, è uno dei diversi centri che promuovono le qualità terapeutiche del petrolio.

Gli ospiti sperano di alleviare i dolori alle articolazioni, ringiovanire la pelle e migliorare il metabolismo, con questi bagni nel caldo, denso, liquido nero.

Sono permessi però solo 10 minuti di immersioni, prima che gli assistenti li facciano uscire e avviare alle docce.

This is a pretty special newsletter for me concerning announcements. First, I have graduated from the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service, which ends a two-year chapter of my life first in Washington, DC and then commuting between there and New York over the past year. While it was a fascinating educational experience, I am ready to move on to new projects and pastures.

As a photographer, my work grew as well over those two years, for me most notably last summer when I was a recipient of a National Geographic Young Explorers Grant which facilitated travel photographing the social and economic life along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline which delivers Caspian crude to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan by way of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

Recently, this work was published on the National Geographic website in a photo gallery entitled, “At Five Years, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture,” with accompanying text by Marianne Lavelle.

Lastly, the biggest bit of news. As a consequence of this work and my interest in the people, culture and history of Azerbaijan, I will be returning to Baku next year and call the city as a base as a Fulbright grant recipient in photography.

I should note I have also updated my website, www.amandarivkin.com, to reflect recent and recently published work such as the “Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline” and coverage of Rahm Emanuel’s recent mayoral run in a new gallery of “Chicago Politics“.

Until July 20, I will be in Chicago and available for assignments across the city. As always, thank you for your interest and attention to my work.

Warm regards,

Amanda Rivkin

Pictures: At Five Years Old, BTC Pipeline Moves Oil, Culture
National Geographic
June 10, 2011

A New World Unveiled

Photograph by Amanda Rivkin

The landlocked Asian nation of Azerbaijan forged a powerful connection to the West five years ago with the first delivery of oil through one of the most ambitious energy projects of a generation—a $4.2 billion, 1,100-mile (1,800-kilometer) pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean coast.

When the deal was originally struck in 1994 for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, the late Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev called it “the Contract of the Century”—the first time a former Soviet state had signed a deal for its oil to reach international markets without going through Russia.

It was also hailed as a major policy success for the United States, which had engaged in years of intensive diplomacy to build an avenue for Caspian oil wealth that did not rely on Moscow. (Related: BP’s map of the pipeline route)

The BTC has the capacity to deliver 1.2 million barrels of oil per day to the Turkish port of Ceyhan from the giant offshore Azeri-Chriag-Guneshli field, and the revenue Azerbaijan earns from this single project is a major driver of the nation’s economy. In the first quarter of this year, the pipeline was delivering oil at a rate one-third below capacity, about 800,000 barrels per day.

In the BTC era, Azerbaijan is literally and figuratively a nation between East and West. More than 99 percent of its population is Muslim, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. And yet, the government of Ilham Aliyev, son of Heydar Aliyev and president since 2003, has encouraged a more secular society. In the view of some analysts, he has fostered warm relations with Western governments, despite accusations of corruption, by positioning his country as a bulwark against Islamic radicalism and, of course, as a source of oil.

A young women dressed in Western garb, above, hastily adds the required head covering before entering the Shi’a Icherishahar Djuma Masjid, or Innercity Mosque, for Friday prayers in the old city of Baku, Azerbaijan. It is one of a series of photos taken by National Geographic Young Explorer Amanda Rivkin in a summer 2010 journey to document life along the route of the pipeline.

—Marianne Lavelle, with research by Amanda Rivkin

(more images on the National Geographic website)

After viewing “Bureaucratics” by Jan Banning at the HERE Arts Center in the West Village New York last night, I was determined to comb the archives for images of that ubiquitous figure on assignments – the bureaucrat – who only occasionally makes the cut of a final edit for publication or submitted for such. As Mr. Banning has gone to the trouble of forming clusters around nations and functions, my attempt to do the same with this selection of five from the archives.

First, from my own country taken from assignments for The New York Times and the non-profit investigative website ProPublica in Iowa, the Illinois statehouse, and the stagnating Indiana town of Elkhart.

Marriage license and vital records clerk Rebecca Badtram, Scott County Recorder’s Office in Davenport, Iowa on April 27, 2009, the first day same sex weddings are legal across Iowa.

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Assistant to beleaguered Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, Mary Stewart cleaning out her workspace adjacent to Blagojevich’s during the conclusion of his impeachment trial at the state capitol in Springfield, Illinois on January 29, 2009.

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Elkhart, Indiana Mayor Dick Moore on April 8, 2009.

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CONCLUSIONS: In America, bureaucrats’ functions range from managing city budgets to delivering coffee to the governor and packing up his desk when he is ousted on corruption charges. They also issue marriage and death certificates. To each, his or her own respective desk, office and accoutrement. Mary Stewart has the American Flag and Elkhart Mayor Dick Moore has a portrait of the first family with the White House seal behind it.

In the Turkic world, from Turkey and Azerbaijan functionaries of a religious and the intersection of business and government make an appearance in the archives.

From Azerbaijan, I have this image in a Baku highrise along the Neftciler Prospekt (Oil Workers’ Boulevard) of Shahmar Movsumov, the Executive Director of the State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan which is responsible for managing the foreign financial assets of the state’s oil wealth and operates independently of the the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), on July 20, 2010. A portrait of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev hangs over Movsumov’s desk.

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And in Turkey, the mosque attendant at the Lala Pasha Mosque in the conservative northeastern city of Erzurum on the first night of Ramadan, August 11, 2010.