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Mathias Depardon

Mathias Depardon was the laureate of the Bourse du Talent in 2011 for his reportage Beyond the Borders. His work has been published by Le Monde, Monocle, Elle, Internazionale, the Sunday Times Magazine, and Foreign Policy.

Photographer

Photography by Mathias Depardon

Boomtown on the Caspian

Fall 2016 | Reporting

The nation of Azerbaijan, wedged into the Caucasus Mountains between Russia and Iran, is small, geopolitically vulnerable, and relatively new to the contrivance of nationhood. Most of its history has been spent on the fringes of someone else’s empire; millennia of successive imperial occupations ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union, and, over the twenty-five years since, Azerbaijanis have been experimenting with novel forms of national pride.