All posts tagged: azerbaijan

From the Archive: The Beginning of a Post-Soviet Dream

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Yesterday, I won a Fulbright (!!!) student scholarship to Azerbaijan. Today I began to reflect on what this might mean and began to think of some images, among many other things, that united me to Azeris and other people in the region. Peculiarly, the first thing that came to mind was this quote from my U.S. passport that anyone who has seen it from Bratislava to Baku (if you were a “Seinfeld” fan you must surely remember, “It’s been a long journey from Milan to Minsk…”) cannot help but memorize, recite and possibly even begin to call me “young man”. One friend sent a note when I received the Fulbright, “Go east, young man,” no doubt a tribute to the Horace Greeley quote in the latest U.S. passport design: “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” – Horace Greeley Additionally, I combed through some old images to find a few that united east, and west in some interesting form: (It is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, celebrated as a …

The Blog: 2010 in Review

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WordPress e-mailed me the following info at the start of the new year. Thought it might be a good way to kick off the new year, with reflection on the one that most recently just passed. These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010: 1. Holiday Print Sale: THANK YOU to Everyone Who Has Ordered Prints So Far 2. The Best in WikiLeaks Cablegate Coverage from News Sites Around the World 3. About 4. From the Archive: Muslims Wearing Things 5. Traveling to Azerbaijan: The New Visa Regime

The Year in Pictures 2010: United States, Cuba, Slovakia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Hungary

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The Year in Pictures 2010 by Amanda Rivkin available on PhotoShelter Archive. Images from the year include: Gitmo USA – the prison site designated for Guantanamo Bay detainees after the prison’s closure in rural Illinois that never quite opened because the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has not yet closed. Portrait of William Fiedler, Owner of the Gallery Bookstore, Chicago – My former boss at one of the North Side’s finest used book stores. Injured Veteran – Portrait of Michael Jernigan, injured in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004; photographed at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Baltasar Garzon – Former examining magistrate of Spain’s Criminal Court, extraordinarily controversial for execution of the practice of universal justice and far-reaching indictments of foreign leaders and terrorist organizations; photographed at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago. Afghan Bowling Tournament (3 images) – Afghan-American bowling tournament in Annandale, Virginia. Cuba (8 images) – The Second Age of Castro, published on ForeignPolicy.com and The New York Times “Week in Review”. Spectacular Slovakia (13 images) – Weddings, floods, world cup, trains, planes, castles, …

Newsletter: [Subject Line Should Read] Verve Photo / Holiday Print Sale / CHICAGO!

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Newsletter went out today, sadly, sigh, with a mistaken subject line that ought have read “Verve Photo / Holiday Print Sale / CHICAGO!” Hopefully the fact that it accidentally went out with the last newsletter subject line will not deter folks because this has some new images from Azerbaijan and Rahm Emanuel on the campaign trail for Chicago mayor that have not been seen before: First off, happy holidays to one and all! Some recent news, updates and events… VERVE PHOTO Today on Verve Photo, Geoffrey Hiller’s popular photo industry blog, one of my images from my work following the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline route last summer is featured: From the story behind the image: “The group of people who took me to this beach were Bakuvian urban elites, a banker, a PhD student in Germany, among others who had professional jobs that ensured that when they went to the beach it was more private, less polluted and in turn more expensive. It was a strange site, the two groups representing the two Azerbaijans. The fact …

Today on Verve Photo: Amanda Rivkin in Azerbaijan

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Amanda Rivkin Verve Photo: The New Breed of Documentary Photographers December 13, 2010 Amanda Rivkin (b.1984, USA) is currently based in Brooklyn while completing a master’s degree in security studies: terrorism and sub-state violence at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. Previously based in her hometown, Chicago, where she travels frequently, her work has appeared on the front pages of Le Monde, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and Courrier Japan, The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and The London Sunday Times Magazine. She received a Young Explorers Grant from the Expeditions Council of the National Geographic Society to travel to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and eastern Turkey for a project, “Exploring the Evolving Oil Economy: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline,” in 2010. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Sarah Lawrence College. About the Photograph: “This photo was taken on a beach in the Bibi Heybat section of southern Baku, Azerbaijan on the 4th of July, 2010, the same day Hillary Clinton visited the oil …

Cablegate Continued: The System Is Watching and Other Sordid Tales From the Day’s Affairs of State

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Accessing the WikiLeaks site has gotten difficult, if not impossible now despite mirror sites and domain names registered at last check in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. However, those that visit the site undoubtedly receive a malware infection pretty fast. Similar tactics took down The Guardian’s website yesterday when it attempted to host a live, online chat with WikiLeaks founder, Interpol fugitive, and known loon, Julian Assange. I hate to ask an obvious question of Mr. Assange, but how does he expect a nation-state, a superpower notably to react? If he gets away with it, so can anyone and the United States of America cannot have that. Joking aside, there is a serious, massive question of what to do with Mr. Assange, how to prosecute him, all the while keeping in mind he may have made himself into a willing martyr of the data revolution and that the U.S. arsenal includes everything from drones to nuclear weapons, neither of which will be used in this case given the strategic predicament. To date, there has been …

Mafia Analogies for the Aliyev Family in Wikileaks/U.S. State Department Cablegate: Is He Michael or Sonny?

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The ongoing flood of U.S. diplomatic cables released by the online repository of leaked government and corporate documents Wikileaks known as “Cablegate,” has led to the release of a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Baku using a mafia analogy of the Corleones from the popular “Godfather” movie based on the Mario Puzo novel of the same title questioning whether Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev is like Michael or Sonny and rendering father Heydar essentially Vito. The cable makes two passing referencing to Emin Milli and Adnan Hajizade, released from prison a little less than two weeks ago after serving several months each on trumped up charges of hooliganism most observers said was little more than a ruse following their satiricial video, dubbed the “donkey video”: Commenting on the GOAJ’s harsh reaction to the YouTube “donkey video” (Reftel A), –––– quipped to the Charge that what one must understand about Aliyev, “He’s not Michael Corleone, he’s Sonny.” Recently in Fortnight Journal I wrote of this video in an article entitled, “Shown Trial”: Milli’s great crime against …

“A Caususes Wedding,” A Pictoral Accompaniment to the Cable of the Same Name

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The recent “Cablegate” affair, 270,000 of leaked U.S. Department of State cables, appearing on the Wikileaks website and excerpted in five newspapers, The New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian simultaneously, has prompted wide disclosures of snarky observations about foreign leaders by U.S. diplomats abroad, disclosed to the world that Arab governments across the Middle East hoped Israel would attack Iran – positions they never would take publicly, and brought out a host of regional and national issues in a series of countries across the globe from Argentina to Albania to Pakistan. But consensus appears to be that a single cable, “A Caucuses Wedding,” by Deputy Chief of Mission to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Daniel Russell, contains some of the finest prose, wittiest detail and overall storytelling. Although not Dagestan, these Bakuvian wedding pictures reveal some commonalities and quotes from the original cable have been excerpted in the caption section of the photographs when you click them open. Without further ado, a proposed pictoral accompaniment from last July in …