Just over three years ago I went to Ethiopia's Omo Valley and took this picture:
So when I went back there a couple of weeks ago I really wanted to see if I could find this girl again and show her the picture. But I knew that it would probably be very unlikely, as the group that she is from - the Hamer - are the biggest tribe in the Omo Valley and there's over 45,000 of them. Still I thought I had a small chance.
So I'm writing this blog now back in Addis after 13 days in the dust, sun, heat and colourful people of the Omo Valley. I am REALLY pleased to say that we managed to meet up again. And Ancho (that's her name) was still as amazing as the first time I met her.
I really think that it was fate that we met up again. There are thousands of Hamer people and hundreds of villages that she could have lived in. Weirdly, the first day that we had photographing in the Omo Valley we went straight to her small village, on morning number one. It was also a pretty hidden village in the bush, and not very well known. Just before I arrived at her village, I switched on my IPOD to bring up this picture, showed my guide and asked him, ‘Do you think we’ll ever find her?’. And as the villagers came running out to see us, I picked her as the first Hamer girl that I wanted to speak with my guide about photographing. I couldn’t help looking at her; at first I thought it was the sister or relative of the girl in my picture. I then started to feel that this really could be her, and so showed her the picture, and immediately I knew it really was. As she looked at it she started giggling to her friends and they all scrambled around to see her , the Ancho from 3 years ago before she got married.
She was REALLY made up when I showed her this picture. And she still looked gorgeous and has the most amazing smile. And as she smiled away I took a chance photograph that that is responsible for starting another revolution in the way I photograph. I also think that I prefer this picture to the last one :)
By the way, a lot of these pictures might look like I extracted the people and put them into a studio to take their portrait with flashes and lots of studio equipment. It couldn't be further from reality. All these were taken in some of the dustiest, hottest places you can imagine...suncream running into my eyes and clouds of fine dust coming up off the dry African earth. They're also all taken just using natural sunlight (no flash or reflectors).
I'm dead pleased with them.
Just over three years ago I went to Ethiopia's Omo Valley and took this picture:
So when I went back there a couple of weeks ago I really wanted to see if I could find this girl again and show her the picture. But I knew that it would probably be very unlikely, as the group that she is from - the Hamer - are the biggest tribe in the Omo Valley and there's over 45,000 of them. Still I thought I had a small chance.
So I'm writing this blog now back in Addis after 13 days in the dust, sun, heat and colourful people of the Omo Valley. I am REALLY pleased to say that we managed to meet up again. And Ancho (that's her name) was still as amazing as the first time I met her.
I really think that it was fate that we met up again. There are thousands of Hamer people and hundreds of villages that she could have lived in. Weirdly, the first day that we had photographing in the Omo Valley we went straight to her small village, on morning number one. It was also a pretty hidden village in the bush, and not very well known. Just before I arrived at her village, I switched on my IPOD to bring up this picture, showed my guide and asked him, ‘Do you think we’ll ever find her?’. And as the villagers came running out to see us, I picked her as the first Hamer girl that I wanted to speak with my guide about photographing. I couldn’t help looking at her; at first I thought it was the sister or relative of the girl in my picture. I then started to feel that this really could be her, and so showed her the picture, and immediately I knew it really was. As she looked at it she started giggling to her friends and they all scrambled around to see her , the Ancho from 3 years ago before she got married.
She was REALLY made up when I showed her this picture. And she still looked gorgeous and has the most amazing smile. And as she smiled away I took a chance photograph that that is responsible for starting another revolution in the way I photograph. I also think that I prefer this picture to the last one :)
By the way, a lot of these pictures might look like I extracted the people and put them into a studio to take their portrait with flashes and lots of studio equipment. It couldn't be further from reality. All these were taken in some of the dustiest, hottest places you can imagine...suncream running into my eyes and clouds of fine dust coming up off the dry African earth. They're also all taken just using natural sunlight (no flash or reflectors).
I'm dead pleased with them.
It was pretty amazing to be in the middle of all this....
I have some more really nice compositions to post...but for now here are a couple that I liked:
Hi from East Africa with the first trip update.
So, I've been out here since October 21st and done a fair bit of travelling to parts of the West and East that I had never been to before. As ever, Ethiopia has been a treat and the people, the landscapes (and the history) of this place are almost enough to let you share the widely held view by Ethiopian people that they are 'different to Africans'. As I understand it, this is the only place in Africa to have avoided colonisation, and the only place in Sub Saharan Africa with recorded civilisation that stretches back thousands of years. So, you really can understand why Ethiopians are proud of their history. So I'm back in chilled out Addis after trips to:
The Afar region around Djibouti, centred around Assaita in the East
The far west of the country - the steaming lowlands of Gambella and further west to the border with Sudan
A trip to the ancient walled city of Harar in the east, a muslim region where boggle eyed men chew quat all day every day (just like in neighbouring Somaliland, parts of Kenya, and Yemen over the water)
My long time friend Mario has also come back out from Germany to see me and spend a few weeks with me like we did in West Africa this time last year. Having spent a lot more time in rural Africa than me (he cycled the continent), it's a pleasure to have with him in tow whilst I work. It's also been a lot of fun...and we've become particularly good at teasing drunk people who seem to often latch on to us at night. The last time we had a persistant drunk in Harar I had to take to playing imaginary golf in the dark with Mario providing the sound effects (to drown out his very annoying and tenacious patter). After a couple of 'holes', and very shortly after I lost an imaginary golf ball under a car, the drunk decided that were annoying him and left. Oh the irony. I dread to think how I will get rid of the drunks when Mario leaves as I can't do the sound effects very well :)
So far the photography has been a bit slow, but I knew the areas I was choosing had their own difficulties to produce work in the way that I like, and so it proved to be the case. Here's some of the first shots from the Afar region next to Djibouti:
I then headed right the way across the country to the far West, basically 3 -4 days road duration to Gambella. After a long road trip back to Addis, I luckily got a flight from Addis to Gambella..and this cut out 2 days of buses which I can thank my lucky stars for. One strech of a couple of days on Ethiopian buses is usually just about bearable....twice this would be a real test of endurance.
So in the far West the terrain is very different to the rest of Ethiopia, and you encounter streamy tropical landscapes which are super humid and very hot. It's very like parts of neighbouring Southern Sudan, and not too dissimilar I imagine to parts of the DRC (Congo). It's such an unusual part of Ethiopia compared to almost every other region, and the people are very different looking...there are lots of very dark skinned lowlanders....many of which came as refugees from Southern Sudan (the spectacularly tall Nuer)... which in a nutshell was the real reason that I went there:
And there I also encountered this man with probably the most extensive facial scarification that I think I've ever come across:
Much more to follow......
Here I come!
T minus 1 week until I get back to Ethiopia, a place that I know well and love. And soon after I will hopefully be in Sudan (inshallah - if I get the visa), a place I have never before visited. I have a feeling that I am going to fall in love with Africa's biggest country and stay beyond my December 18th return date....
Oh, I'm also adding on an unbelievably cute image of two small Himba girls that I came across in a river bed in Northern Kaokoland on the last trip
I'll be blogging again soon...John
Just back from watching the animals.....
Man, I love Etosha. I was there in 2006 and it's a great place to while away the days.
Here's some shots of the Elephants - the biggest ones in Africa. Don't really have the long lens stuff for wildlife photography, but pleased with my elephant shots. Lots more to add.
Managed to catch the elephants on a stampede - ha ha - it was the tiny elephant at the front that started it all!
Check out the panorama below in full size - really nice.
Just uploading bits as I go. Thought that these worked nice in colour :)
Can't come all the way out here and miss out on that, can you?
The first couple of days after I arrived in Namibia we hit the road and headed the 900km's or so North to a town called
Opuwo - a place that has a real feel of a frontier town. One of the first things you notice is the amazing mix of people. You see Ochre covered Himba walking around (in traditional clothing and bare from the waist up), Ova-themba (Angolans in traditional clothing), Herero (woman wear huge Victorian-influenced dresses with hats), and your average urban Africans in western clothes. It's a great mix, and the town has a totally different feel to the more mundane ones further south. Particularly when you bump into people in the supermarket looking like this:
So the first priority once we got up there was to find a good guide who had one foot in our world and one foot in
the Himba community. With some asking around and a little bit of luck we got hooked up with a Himba guy called
'Western', who proved to be a great find and turned into a good friend. Western has that friendliness,
optimism and modesty that Africans often have. He also knows the Himba inside out, having grown up in the
traditional way of living before he ran away to get a schooling in Opuwo. Education is often frowned upon in
nomadic/semi-nomadic groups; it fixes you to one place and means you can't help out with the family during hours
at school. Travelling with a knowledgeable guide like Western makes things a million times easier - you get to
understand the people, cultural practices and ways of living, and are able to have more meaningful interactions through the guide. You also avoid misunderstandings and visits to villages which are more designed for tourist purposes.
The Himba are similar to a lot a African groups that I have met in the last year in Kenya and West Africa - they
live a more or less traditional existence and their lives revolve around their animals. It's very dry up in the
North, so the Himba are often semi-nomadic and move with their animals when they need new pasture.
One thing they also share in common with the groups that I saw in Kenya (apart from the Turkana) is that they practice circumcision; it's a hugely important ceremony that marks the stages of a young person's life. These small boys below that I met in one village had just undergone the ceremony a couple of days ago (shaved heads with two patches showing that they were in the midst of this). It's difficult to imagine how scared the young boys are when the knife comes out as each in turn is cut with a blade in front of the village. They still came across as troubled when I saw them.
Ciao for now....
I've just returned to the capital of Namibia after 2 weeks in the remote North and the Namib Desert. I went to Kaokoland in the far North to photograph the Himba, a visually vibrant society that I briefly came across in 2006. Unusually for me I've been driving a 4x4 on this trip with a screenwriter and author from Canada - Linda. We met on a Lonely Planet forum discussing the Himba and it worked out that we were both looking to get into the wilds at the same time. I had never met Linda until she turned up at the airport a couple of weeks ago. Clearly this could have been a 9 on the Richter scale disaster as we had 2 weeks in each other's pockets lined up. In a massive stroke of fortune, we got on great and travelled really well together. Linda actually headed off today and I'm back to my lonesome for the next week and a half...which feels strange at the moment. The last couple of weeks have brought some beautiful and intimate imagery of the Himba and another Angolan group from the North....but more of that and my time up there on my next blog post.
Because it's fresh in my mind, I wanted to post my work from the Namib desert having arrived back from there only yesterday. We were both covered in sand (suprise suprise), in fact I'm still emptying that glowing red sand out of my shoes today and it's taken a couple of showers to feel grit free. But time in the desert out here is always an elation.
In 2006 I travelled in the Namib for the first time, and for over a week I would just walk across the massive dunes and
marvel at the surreal light and dune forms and textures in the beautiful morning and evening hours. Back then I
just picked a compass direction and walked for a few kilometres into the sand seas. I would see people at the very
peripehery of the sand seas, but as soon as I walked into the dune field I was alone and spent hours walking up and
down the massive dunes in complete solitude. This year was the same and I absolutely loved it. There were very few sounds in what is a very quiet place. A couple of times I heard the faint sound of the wings of a bird of prey cutting
through the air a long way above me, once ot twice I heard the whistling winds travelling down the dune valleys, and on a few occassions I heard the thud of my own heartbeat as I climbed massive, steep dune inclines with each foot submerging into the sand's surface. Try as you might to move your feet quickly, they still sink beneath the sand and it saps the energy. And though the sounds are few, being in the desert is all about rewarding the other senses; in particular the visuals which are turned up to 11 in volume.
Pretty much every other photographer photographs the Namib Desert in colour to show the vibrant red sands. The pictures that I created this year and in 2006 are nearly all in black and white (but a few do have to be seen in colour). I think that quite a few of my desert pictures are similar in style to how I photograph the people in this blog. I gravitate towards photographing scenes of dramatic contrasts.
Much more to follow soon from both the desert and the stunning Himba......
I've just returned to the capital of Namibia after 2 weeks in the remote North and the Namib Desert. I went to Kaokoland in the far North to photograph the Himba, a visually vibrant society that I briefly came across in 2006. Unusually for me I've been driving a 4x4 on this trip with a screenwriter and author from Canada - Linda (I usually travel alone). We met on a Lonely Planet forum discussing visiting the Himba and it worked out that we both wanted to get up there at the same time. I had never met Linda until she turned up at the airport a couple of weeks ago. This could have been a disaster to rival anything on the Richter scale as we had 2 weeks in each other's pockets to get through. In a massive stroke of fortune we got on great and travelled really well together. Linda actually headed off today and I'm back to my lonesome for the next week and a half...which feels strange at the moment. Well the last couple of weeks have brought some beautiful and intense imagery of the Himba and another Angolan group from the North....but more of that and my time up in the North on my next blog post very soon.
Because it's fresh in my mind, I wanted to post my work from the Namib desert having arrived back from there only yesterday. We were both covered in sand (suprise suprise), in fact I'm still emptying that glowing red sand out of my shoes today and it's taken a couple of showers to feel grit free. But time in the desert out here is always an elation.
In 2006 I travelled there for the first time, and for over a week I would just walk across the massive dunes and
marvel at the surreal appearance of dune forms and their textures in the beautiful morning and evening light. Back then I just picked a compass direction and walked for a few kilometres into the sand seas. I would see people at the very
peripehery of the sand seas, but as soon as I walked into the dune field I was compltely alone and spent hours walking up and down the beautiful mountains of sand in solitude. This year was the same and I absolutely loved it. I heard few sounds in what is a deadly quiet place. A couple of times I heard the faint sound of the wings of a bird of prey cutting through the air far above, a couple of other times I heard the whistle of winds travelling through the dune valleys, and on a few occassions I heard the thud of my own heartbeat as I climbed massive, steep dune inclines with each footstep submerging into the sand's surface. Try as you might to move your feet quickly, they still sink beneath the surface and sap your energy. But although you don't hear much out here, being in the desert is all about rewarding the other senses; and in particular the visuals which are cranked up to 11 in volume.
Pretty much every other photographer photographs the Namib Desert in colour to show the vibrant red sands. The pictures that I created this year and in 2006 are nearly all in black and white (but a few do have to be seen in colour). Quite a few of my desert pictures are similar in style to how I photograph the people in this blog, or at least that's what I think. I gravitate to capturing light within scenes of dramatic contrasts.
In the desert there are so many beautiful shapes and textures for creating black and white imagery. Thinking back, I actualy started creating my African portraits in 2006 after spending time in this desert. The desert was the inspiration - I wanted to pair up dramatic sand dune patterns of light with dramatic patterns of light on people. After seeing the dramatic, fluid and flowing blacks and whites in the desert I wanted to recreate this in other scenarios through photographing people. The pairing up of desert shots and people proved to be a bit tricky, but it gave rise to my Africa project of photographing the fascinating people of Africa in dramatic lighting. So I say thanks to the Namib Desert for starting this beautiful project.
