Tom Marsden

This series of photos was inspired by the Franco-Azerbaijani writer Banine and her book Days in the Caucasus, in which she describes growing up in one of Baku's wealthiest families at the turn of the 20th century; her idyllic childhood is interrupted by the Russian revolution in 1917, which leads to the Soviet annexation of the South Caucasus a few years later and Banine's emigration to Paris, from where she never returned. While seeking a final project for my MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography in 2017, Banine's dreamy descriptions of the Caucasus and the air of melancholy pervading her life and work - which mirrored my own feelings of exile having left the UK for Azerbaijan - inspired me to explore the region 100 years later through the prism of her book. I focused on the places she wrote about but also visited various other places in between.