VINTAGE ADDIS ABABA

Recollections of everyday people

Vintage Addis Ababa, launched in July 2017, is a documentary and fine art project that crowdsources old photographs from the public to tell stories of everyday people in the past. We started this initiative to preserve for future generations personal images that are fragile and prone to damage and loss. By the end of 2018 more than 2,000 photographs by 100 contributors in Addis Ababa and across the vast Ethiopian diaspora had been digitized. We used social media to publish and source the photographs, reaching tens of thousands of Ethiopians in Addis Ababa and beyond.

In November 2018 we published a photography book with over 200 of these familiar photos and many stories. The book
was launched in Addis Ababa with a grand exhibition, and we also organized book launches in North American and across Europe. More than 1,000 copies of the book were sold in the first year.

Vintage Addis Ababa was funded by the Embassy of Switzerland, the European Union, Alliance Ethio-Française, and the Embassy of France. The project was featured on the Guardian, the BBC, Quartz, and other international news outlets.

Vintage Addis Ababa was a collaborative effort between Ayaana Publishing and two young Ethiopian writers and media producers, Wongel Abebe and Nafkot Gebeyehu.