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Though we often travel throughout Ethiopia and the region we really enjoy being home. And home for Ayaana is Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa. When home we try and work on personal projects around the community. These are a selection of portraits we’ve recently completed in hopes of showing our ability to capture environmental portraits with location lighting. Enjoy!
A few months back we submitted a proposal to the Swiss embassy here in Ethiopia to expand Dhugasho and grow it's reach. From research we've found Somalis are by and large accessing Dhugasho via mobile phones. We wanted to show this in the images we included in the proposal. Take a look at what we came up with and be sure to follow Dhugasho on Facebook here.
With the number of social media apps growing daily it’s becoming increasingly important for companies and NGOs to have lots of visual content for their audience. This is one of the reasons why an image library can be so valuable. It gives you a pool of assets which last a long time and can be used outside of social media.
We’ve worked with CCL before (see here), we love their mission and were excited about the idea of creating a library for them to utilize. It was a quick shoot with a short turnaround but that didn’t prevent us from making some high quality images.
This shoot took place in and around their offices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We came away with some real world situations that exemplifies who CCL is and what they do.
Helvetas is a Swiss development organization doing a lot of work in Ethiopia. From suspended foot bridges (yes, you read that correctly) to vocational training, they are partnering with the community to increase sustainability and build generational change.
For this short film they wanted us to capture the impact their partnerships with vocational training institutions are having for families and their communities. There is a big demand for skilled workers in Ethiopia and these schools can play a role in filling that need.
Helvetas’ way of placing people in these programs is different though. They use an incentive model when partnering with schools. The institutions are only paid 80% of the student fees up front while the remaining 20% is paid once the trainee has found a steady job or has established a successful business.
Already they are seeing results. About 2,000 people have already received a three month training (80% of which are women) and over 75% of them have gained employment. Those are exciting numbers and it’s this kind of outside-the-box thinking which got us excited to do this film!
CCL's goal is “to advance the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide.”
We are fortunate enough to work with one of their 12 global offices on a regular basis. To date we have done several short documentary films for their office in Addis Ababa as well as build up an image library to use in their proposals, advertising and social media.
After getting to know CCL, we discovered that not only did they have great stories from their work in the Horn of Africa, but they have great stories from within their organization. Aspiring to produce something that explained the culture and vision of the company, we featured three women who began as mentors in college, then started leading those very programs and eventually started working with CCL in an official capacity.
We love CCL’s mission to use their 40+ years of research to grow leaders across the world through contextualized instruction. Stay tuned to see more of our work with them!
For these Somalis in the Horn of Africa, life was good. They had their family and their animals and they knew when the rains would fall. Their camels and goats were their currency and the rain was their lifeblood. It determined the steps they would take, where they would journey to next so they all could flourish. But one day the rains stopped falling. One drought was survivable. But then they started to come one after the other. That’s when life changed.
Thankfully, VSF, an international network of non-profits working to support small scale farmers, came alongside these locals to educate them in a new way of life. They want them to thrive no matter what the environment brings their way. We partnered with them to tell this story.
Have you flown with Ethiopian Airlines in the last year? If so, you may have noticed this coffee cover feature of the in-air Selamta Magazine. One of our photographers was brought on to contribute his photos to the Nov-Dec 2018 issue telling the story of coffee. Here is a glimpse into the article! You can still see the complete digital article here.
This November we launched our latest book, Vintage Addis Ababa: Recollections of Everyday People. It was a wonderful evening at Alliance Ethio-Française with an indoor and outdoor photography exhibition, live music, guests from the Swiss and French embassies as well as those who are featured in the book! Below are a few analog photos of the event to fit the vintage aesthetic of the book.
If you haven’t picked up your own copy of Vintage Addis Ababa, it is available for purchase directly from us or on Amazon USA.
If you are in Addis Ababa you can get your copy at Book World or have it delivered to your home by Deliver Addis.
