It was not without a profound sense of irony that I went to Ethiopia to shoot humanitarian images for a
cookbook. This iconic country in the horn of Africa is known more for war and famine than it is for it’s
food or it’s culture – the two things we were there to research, experience and capture in word
and image.
I left Vancouver on New Year’s Day with two friends; one a professional photographer, and the other
a chef at one of Vancouver ’s most celebrated new restaurants. I was the third in the group, a comedian
who moonlights as a writer, graphic designer and travel photographer. We were an unlikely trio on an unlikely
journey. Six months earlier we had dreamed up Tribal Cookbooks, a series of cookbooks focusing on countries
in the so-called Third World . The books would be a blend of travelogue, humanitarian photography/writing,
and food, and the net proceeds from the sale of the books would return to the countries featured – in
the case of the first book, Ethiopia.
Ethiopia occupies a flat, dusty, hungry place in our minds. Many of us were old enough to register the
tragedy when images of starving Ethiopian children flashed across our television screens beginning in 1984.
Nearly a million people died in that famine alone. If we think any further about Ethiopia it is usually to
thoughts of brutal wars with neighboring Eritrea . Beyond that most of us would draw a blank.
Ethiopia is unquestionably a tragic place. The number of AIDS orphans is expected to hit one million in
2006. HIV/AIDS is decimating sub-Saharan Africa , and Ethiopia is taking much of the force from that hit.
But to see a country only in terms of its tragedies is to entirely dismiss the people, the preceding thousands
of years of history and culture, and the things that make every nation unique.
That these people have faced down death over and over again does not define them, but it has formed them.
What I found in Ethiopia, and here I will switch to the first person because I can only honestly recount
my own reactions and experience, was similar to what I have found in other third world countries. Hardship,
for those who survive it, often has a beautifying effect on the soul of a people. For all their hardships
the Ethiopians are a beautiful, beautiful people.
They are also a young people. Half the population of Ethiopia is under the age of fifteen years old. Everywhere
we looked we saw children doing the work of adults. Six year olds driving cattle, small girls carrying water
jugs that would give me a hernia, large bundles of firewood walking down the road of their own accord – protruding
little legs the only hint of the little human underneath. Everywhere we went we were greeted with waving
and smiling and shouts of YOU! YOU! YOU! Sometimes they wanted something, sometimes the wave changed to an
open hand and a request for pens or money, shoes or pants. But by far the greatest part of the waving and
smiling was simply for the smiling and waving. I remember being high in the Simien mountains and seeing two
children, a boy and a girl both about 6 or 7 years old, running barefoot over stony fields, running faster
than I remember ever being able to run at that age, just to wave and smile and watch the old Land Cruiser
rumble by with its load of dusty white people. And I remember thinking that all the smiling and waving was
having an effect on my soul and stripping away the cynicism that had accumulated over time.
Ethiopia is a country that seems to move to the rhythms of land and faith. It is in parts a mountainous,
rugged, hardscrabble countryside, and every inch of it seems to be farmed. Mountains most of us would barely
consider hiking up are terraced and farmed. Remaining space is grazing land. We were there during harvest
and it seemed like everyone was winnowing grain, gathering stalks into tidy piles, or plowing in preparation
for the coming rains.
While we tend to relegate faith and its practice to the private places of our lives in the west, in Ethiopia
it is lived openly and unavoidably. Ethiopians are largely Orthodox Christian by faith. The rest are Muslim,
and while they’ve had their moments of animosity and quarrel – notably when Queen Gudit went
on a tenth century rampage and burned down a good number of churches and monasteries – they’ve
lived peacefully together for ages.
We planned our journey to coincide with Leddet, or Orthodox Christmas. We were in Lalibela, and the memories
from that day will remain with me forever, so deeply moving and disturbing were they. Lalibela is best known
for its rock hewn churches – intricate monolithic buildings carved out of the red sandstone. They are
filled with ancient illuminated manuscripts and weathered priests wrapped in prayer beads and yellow shawls.
The walls are punctuated by grottos and caves where hermits and monks have lived, studied, and prayed for
centuries since Prince Lalibela returned from an exile in Jerusalem (he was avoiding his brother – some
things never change) and created this mysterious city in a place the Lonely Planet guide calls “the
back of beyond.”
The road to Lalibela was long and torturous, called a “road” only, I suspect, on a technicality.
It is dusty and rocky and so long that thinking of the trip as a pilgrimage is not out of place. Lalibela
at Leddet was, I think, the closest I will ever come to experiencing Bethlehem on that first century Christmas.
We took a reserved room in a government-run hotel, but due to a mix up our second room was occupied. There
was, it seemed, no room at the inn. I slept on the floor.
We hiked to the churches before first light, joining throngs of pilgrims, all robed in the white traditional
robes of the orthodox in Ethiopia. We were surrounded by the rich and the poor, the old and the young – the
young all vying for spots as our guides. We walked through pressing crowds of the faithful, often through
human feces, and always past lepers and the disfigured.
Travel photography in Lalibela was both a great joy and a sharp pain. I shot four gigabytes of images before
noon, and returned after dinner to capture the last light of the day and shoot another two gigs. The churches
were amazing and some of the encounters I had that day were among the most toughing of my life. But there
are times when raising a camera to the eye is next to impossible. One of the reasons I went to Lalibela at
Leddet was one of my own personal faith. I too wanted to pilgrimage, to experience the sacred in a different
setting and see the divine in different faces (to vaguely reference Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins). And
experience those things I did. But faith is always by nature a struggle if it is honest, and seeing in that
sacred place such broken people, people who’ve struggled through wars and famine and the death of family
to HIV/AIDS, and now leprosy – to see them there and in such squalor made me wonder at the depth and
endurance of their faith and the unavoidable shallowness of my own. And it made it really hard to create
images. Raising my camera to my eye felt like a violation of something I should be experiencing, not recording.
At times it simply felt predatory, as though my capturing those moments were taking more than a moment, stealing
their dignity and the sacred privacy of those moments. There are times for me when experiencing the moment
is primary, recording it only an afterthought – the artist who always copies life and never lives it
experiences a different kind of poverty.
It would take a book to describe the rest of my experiences over those three weeks. We visited the city
of Harar , a walled city of 1km square in which they are a hundred mosques and hyenas wandering without at
night. We spent time at Debre Damo, a remote monastery in the north, perched atop a mountain and accessible
only by climbing the final seventy five foot cliff with the help of a rope and a monk with large biceps.
We saw Axum and the supposed resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. We visited island monasteries on Lake
Tana , the source of the Nile , boating past hippos and myriad colorful birds on the way. We logged seventy
hours in a red Land Cruiser some twenty years past its prime. We shot over thirty gigs each, and cleaned
our sensors more times than I can count. We wandered spice markets, the air so thick with chilies that we
coughed and sputtered for the rest of the day. We drank the best coffee of our lives, ate raw, undercooked,
and overcooked beef, lamb, and goat and with each mouthful prayed that a merciful God would prevent us from
dying of amoebic dysentery, or at very least kill us quickly. We met countless children who told us they
had no parents – father died in the war, mother died of AIDS.
Our time in Ethiopia was the trip of a lifetime. I worked harder than I have ever worked, was up earlier
and to bed later. I think I shot better images than I have ever shot. And those moments I couldn’t
record, the ones that I felt I needed to experience and not shoot – those moments have worked something
in me that I could never have captured anyway. They will stay with me longer than a travel photograph ever
could.
Technical Data
For those to whom this kind of thing is like a crack addiction…
I shoot with two cameras – always. I was not incognito and like it that way. I prefer, generally,
to interact with the people and culture I am shooting. My primary body was a Canon 20D with 17-40L lens,
and my second body was a 300D with a 50mm/1.8 or 80-200/2.8. Occasionally a Manfrotto tripod or monopod
came with me. Always wearing a Domke Photog vest (I came to grips with the loss of “cool” years
ago – now it’s all about how many batteries I can carry) and sometimes my LowePro Computrekker
AW. I shot two high speed 1GB cards and supported it all with a PowerBook. I am also never without my anglefinder,
blower brush, and some funny looking red sponge balls for impromptu magic tricks with kids. I shoot RAW.
While the 17-40 is not an ideal portrait lens I like to shoot in tight spaces and shoot a lot of children – the
wide angle allows me some really playful portraits of children and allows me to show them in their context.
It’s not everyone’s thing but I love it. The 50/1.8 is, for my money, one of the best all around
lenses out there. I am never without it. And I know if I scratch it to pieces crawling around a tomb or
climbing a cliff I can replace it without having to sell any internal organs.
I charge my stable of camera and PowerBook batteries with an inverter in the car. Unless I get to Africa and
discover that the Land Cruiser is 24V and not 12V. In which case I put the inverter in the trunk and sweat
about whether my next hotel will have outlets that actually supply power.
About the Author
After shooting for twenty years and spending twelve of those as a professional comedian, David duChemin turned back to his first love – photography. An impassioned travel and humanitarian photographer, David has shot on five continents for assignments and projects covering places as diverse as Paris, Haiti, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and India. David’s portfolio can be found online at www.pixelatedimage.com and his blog can be read at www.pixelatedimage.typepad.com. David makes his home in Vancouver, Canada.
