All posts tagged: georgia

Emphas.Is Crowdfunding Goal Met!

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Late Monday night Baku time, my Emphas.Is crowdfunding goal to raise $4,250 online to return to the BTC Pipeline route was met! I have enough funds to travel this winter to places and meet people whose lives have been effected by the 1,100 mile transnational oil pipeline route in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. A great many thanks to all 82 supporters who to date have leant their support to this project! Any additional funds raised now will go to expand the project to include the conflict zones that have helped determine the current pipelines geography and additional costs incurred as a result of this important study on the post-Soviet, post-Cold War reality of international energy commerce. To support the project, please visit my Emphas.Is “BTC Pipeline” project page. Thank you!

June Newsletter: National Geographic publishes BTC pipeline / Fulbright to Azerbaijan

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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 …

Young Explorers’ Grant Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline Photo Essay Published On National Geographic Website

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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 …

In Memoriam: Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington

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I am still at a loss for the enormous quantity of injuries to photojournalism in recent months, beginning for this generation with Emilio Morenatti of The Associated Press on August 12, 2009. An Associated Press account of the bomb “planted in the open desert terrain,” according to the American military, left Morenatti without his foot as he traveled in southern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border with AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko and a unit of the 5th Stryker Brigade. Again in southern Afghanistan, Joao Silva one of the four founding members of the famous group of South African photographers covering the end of apartheid known as “the Bang Bang club,” was hit by a mine and lost both legs, as reported October 23, 2010 by his employer The New York Times. This spring came the awful and surreal detentions of well known and intrepid New York Times conflict photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks alongside reporters Anthony Shadid and Stephen Farrell in Libya. Then obviously and most recently came the tragic deaths a whole …

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, …

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 …

*** holiday print sale *** / 17 prints for $75 each

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*** holiday print sale ! *** 17 prints for $75 each student discount: $50 print: 6″x10″ file size / 8″ x 10″ paper to order, send a request to: amanda.rivkin@gmail.com I am offering up a selection of 17 different prints to choose from, each $75 for the holidays in an effort to fundraise for my forthcoming trip to Hungary to cover the aftermath of the toxic alumina industrial accident in the town of Ajka that occurred when a storage reservoir ruptured and sent toxic red sludge pouring into neighboring villages. Any additional funds will go towards supporting my long term project on the “Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan: Exploring the Evolving Oil Economy,” visually charting nearly 1,100 miles of oil pipeline delivering Caspian crude oil from south of the Azeri capitol Baku through Georgia and the Caucuses and to the port of Ceyhan in Turkey’s far southeast, near the Syrian border. The pipeline traverses three nations, lands belonging to believers in two of the world’s great religions, and skirts five conflict zones. In the process, a region accustomed to …

From the Archive: Same Scene, Only Two Years Later “Post-War”

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In late July and early August I was traveling in Georgia, a post-Soviet state on the make, as part of my work following the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline route. Two years ago in 2008, the new nation-state was beset by misfortune in the form of invasion by its northerly neighbor, Russia. A short but devastating nine day war ensued in mid-August over the self-proclaimed independent republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia’s north and northwest. A primary theater in the armed conflict was the Georgian city of Gori, most famous as it is the birthplace of Iosef Dzughashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin who ruled the former Soviet Union with an iron first and a mass murderous streak from 1922 until his death in 1953. In some parts of the now former Eastern Bloc like Poland, de-Stalinzation did not occur until 1957, a year after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) renouncing the Soviet crimes of Stalinist excess. In 2008, several images from the Georgian …

The New York Times Lens Blog Turning Point Series: Yana Paskova on Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Yana Paskova on Henri Cartier-Bresson By KERRI MACDONALD AND AMANDA RIVKIN August 25, 2010 12:00pm Yana Paskova, 28, was born in Bulgaria, raised in Chicago and is now based in New York. She has worked across the United States and in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune and Time Magazine. Amanda Rivkin’s conversation with Ms. Paskova has been edited and condensed. Q. How was this picture taken? A. This photo was originally meant to be a part of a square-format portrait project, but remained in my general campaign work long after the idea. I took this photo in the summer of 2007, an opaque moment when it came to predicting who would become the next president of the U.S. Until the brief instant Hillary Clinton stepped under the shadows of a tree to talk with potential supporters, I had filled a long day of campaign events chasing any facial expression or moment that would birth some sort of different photo. But with the …