The project Lahich- Village of Craftsmen includes a series of photographs telling a story of one day in the village of Lahich in Azerbaijan. In contradistinction to previous works of mine, this time, the goal was to capture the mode of life of the villagers in post-quarantine times. The other idea of this project was to show the national flavour of the country. Lahich, a town of artisans and craftsmen, is one of several places in Azerbaijan where you can experience the spirit of antiquity in contrast to the modernized Baku. Narrow streets lined with river stone, where every shop or workshop is a part of the home of every inhabitant, demonstrate the ideology of unity of these people despite the difficult period during the pandemic.

About

Ayaz Hajiyev was born in 1991 in Baku, Azerbaijan. 2017 turned out to be the year of the beginning of Ayaz's creative activity in the field of photography. It all started with experiments, the very process of which seemed to the photographer quite meditative. "At the moment of taking a photograph, there is no past or future. There is only a moment of the present, and all thoughts are embodied in the frame itself," Ayaz says. All this smoothly developed into the Tech Noir project. The project was inspired by the cyberpunk genre and 80s aesthetics such as retrowave and new wave. The next experiments were documentary and street photography, which Ayaz started at the end of 2019. The action taking place during the 2020 quarantine helped to explore the genre to its fullest. Subsequently, in 2020, Ayaz joined the 35Awards international photo competition, as a result of which he was included in the list of 70 best photographers of Azerbaijan.

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