Tom Marsden

While based in Azerbaijan, between 2015 and 2020 I made regular visits to the village of Ivanovka, located near the Caucasus Mountains in the Ismayilli region of north-central Azerbaijan. At the time I was learning photography and looking for a project, and this place stood out to me because it felt like travelling back in time. Founded in the early 19th-century by Russian Molokans exiled to the South Caucasus by the Tsarist authorities, the village still had a large ethnic Russian population, including a small community of practising Molokans, and was home to Azerbaijan's last-functioning Soviet-style collective farm.