I received a phone call from my cousin one afternoon. Our uncle, unconscious, was being rushed to the hospital.

We took him to a private hospital and later shifted him to a public one. It wasn’t an easy decision. We walked through the poorly lit emergency ward through a devastating scenery of ill people sleeping on the floor and exhausted physicians struggling to keep it altogether. We regretted our decision right there and then.

But what was more surprising was that we met the same doctor who previously saw us at the private hospital. He was working two nights in a row against regulations to earn more money.

In Ethiopia, the doctor to patient ratio is 1 to 17,000 but they’re still among the lowest paid professionals in the country. New graduates are unemployed due to poor facility(that’s right, no job) but are still prohibited from leaving the country.

So I’m gonna stop this story here as I think it’s obvious by now for you, the reader, how messed up the system can be. I acknowledge the endless problems we have in Africa.

And what has photography to do with this?

As a kid, tattooed in the hearts of many of my generation is the story of Oxford dictionary citing Ethiopia as an example of famine. In 1984, the country was hit hard by drought and has ever since been known by the world for famine and starvation.

I believe that could be one of the reasons why the government introduced the idea of ‘image building’ a few years ago. As the name implies, Image building is changing the image and the perception of the country. Part of that means projecting as many good stories and images of the country as possible. So what are ‘good images’ for an African country like Ethiopia?

I googled stock photos of Ethiopia and they are of beautiful landscapes, pretty faces, churches, the Omo valley (duh!) and the rest of tourist attracting locations.

That was the very recent ‘google’ search I made out of curiosity but a few years of visual platforms like instagram and better result oriented searches have helped me understand what the general ‘perception’ of good images of Africa are. Not just for foreign photographers but also for many African photographers who train their eyes from these same images as well.

I started photography around eight years ago. Not as a professional but pretty much as a hobbyist (as much as I feel wildly uncomfortable with both wordings). What I’ve been through the past few years required some skill, some talent, some dedication and undeniably, some luck. But I’m stuck now - I’m curious to know how many people made this transition. I’m stuck not because I don’t have any ideas but because I don’t know how best to execute them. I know how to execute them for money but that may not always be the best way.

Even though I’ve come this far in photography, I’m digging to know if I need a stage of unlearning or just hitting the restart button. It’s not rare times one may feel like a researcher looking for a new medicine to treat some illness that has been there forever. And the insecurity deepens when one realizes they might die trying.

A friend once said to me, “Africa is a big village for many westerners. I once told this stranger in New York airport I am from Ethiopia and he asked me if I know his friend Tito, who is from Africa”.

As African photographers, how do we build differently from a similar past we share? How can you approach a complex issue in Africa and can you do it alone? Do we build a collective narrative that stands so complex together or build individual narratives that are so powerful that they’re complex standing alone?

We always complain about how ‘not’ to photograph Africa. And/But the reality is except for those images that completely cross the line, it’s sometimes very difficult to draw a line for many of our images. How do we show the problems along with the context behind the problems? And how do we portray the diversity without having to necessarily beautify it? The truth is, we still haven’t come up with the ABCs of photographing complex stories in Africa and it’s still questionable whether or not we require the ABCs in the first place. A ‘beautiful’ Africa is still a well portrayed Africa for many.

On a related but largely unrelated topic, during her funeral service in 1997, Princess Diana’s brother gave a strong eulogy and perhaps one that demolished an easy and simplified narrative of the complex individual. He said, ‘There is a temptation to rush to canonize your [Princess Diana’s] memory, there is no need to do so. You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities not to need to be seen as a saint.’

I think the same line, more or less can work for Africa. Which direction is the industry taking in this rush to “decolonize” the stereotypical images of war and starving children? Perhaps what we need is not the label of the “innocent”, the “beautiful”, the “rich tradition”or “the safari”. We do not need the label of the ‘black magics” either because the minute something becomes magic, it’s deprived of its existence in the present. Perhaps what we need is to be understood as a billion of human beings living in diverse 54 countries that may have the power to cut through decades of hierarchical representation and skewed documentation.

Only then people might stop asking us, “ Do you know a person named Tito who’s from Africa?”.

Maheder Haileselassie is a photographer based in Ethiopia interested in social and environmental issues. To see her works click here.

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On building the image of Africa - I