All photos © Rena Effendi. Above: Mountain dweller on horseback in Xinaliq Village, Azerbaijan.

Rena Effendi’s new exhibition, Real Color, on view at the Gallery.Photographer.ru at Winzavod Center of Contemporary Art in Moscow includes photographs from four different series, all united by the idea of “documentary color” as a form of artistic expression. Red is the festive color in the clothes and wedding ceremony interiors of a highland village, Khinalug, and in this case denotes fertility and emergence of a new life. Brown dominates in charred bombed walls, smoky refugees’ housings and the distribution of ocher-colored bread in a godforsaken barn chronicled during the five-day war in Georgia. Black gold gleams on the sunburned Absheron coast’s industrial oil landscapes gleam, serving as a dramatic background for local inhabitants. White is prominent in the story on Chernobyl exclusion zone settlers as radiation, the unseen enemy, is in the winter landscape of abandoned villages, the dust of a deserted town and the gray hair of the last remaining residents. To see more of Effendi’s work click here To see more of Effendi’s work click here.

Boy flexing muscles by a Soviet era oil rig. Balakhani village. Baku, Azerbaijan.

Woman baking bread in Tandoor, Xinaliq Village, Azerbaijan.

Sisters in law at home. Xinaliq village, Azerbaijan.

Man in the landing passage of the unfinished emergency hospital building now a refugee settlement since 1993. Baku, Azerbaijan.

Laundry hanging on the oil field. Balakhani, Baku, Azerbaijan.