If there is one photographer who is very hands-on with her work, so much so that she still uses and prefers manual/analog photography to digital photography, it is Ethiopian born Aida Muluneh. The photographer and contemporaray artist does not believe in the ease and simplicity of digital photography; rather she thinks that “in this digital world, every photographer should get his or her hands dirty in the darkroom. I am still having a hard time accepting digital photography and having 20,000 images to edit every time I go shooting”, and as regards monochrome images, she says “truth is either black or white. Human elements are exhibited though it. Black and white is the foundation. Colour is tricky. But whatever I use, my focus is capturing light”.
Born in 1974, young Aida left her home country, Ethiopia, and after spending her migrant childhood between Yemen and England, she settled in Canada in 1985 with several years of boarding school in Cyprus behind her. She then graduated from Howard University in 2001 with a B.A. in film, radio and television after which she worked as a freelance photojournalist with the Washington Post and other publications. Along came the planned three-month visit to Ethiopia which lasted till the present and Aida poured herself into photography and also founded DESTA (Developing and Educating Societies Through the Arts), an organization that has promotion of cultural development through the use of photography by providing workshops, exhibitions and creative exchanges.
Aida Muluneh’s works are so deep and compelling that it has been found worthy of exhibition as a group of her artworks can be located in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the Museum of Biblical Art in the United States. She also received the European Union Prize in the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamoko, Mali in 2007 and the CRAF International Award of Photography in Spilimbergo,Italy in 2010. She also founded the Addis Foto Fest, the first international photography festival in Ethiopia and is currently the Director of the Modern Art Museum/ Gebre Kristos Desta Center inside the Addis Ababa University .
You can find more of Aida’s works here: 1) http://www.contempafricanart.com/artist.asp?id=AidaMuluneh&inl=1 2) http://destaforafricaorg.blogspot.it/ and catch her on Twitter at @aidamuluneh and on Instagram as @aidamuluneh.
More pictures below:
