Ethiopia 2025 – The Human Encounter
Documentary Photography Project
A long-term documentary photography project exploring daily life, dignity, and human connection through quiet visual encounters in southern Ethiopia.
This body of work was developed during repeated journeys in the Omo Valley among the Suri, Mursi, Hamer, Arbore, Nyangatom, and Ari communities. The photographs do not aim to describe cultures in an ethnographic sense, but to create moments of presence — suspended instants in which two gazes meet with mutual awareness and consent.
The camera is never used as an instrument of capture, but as a tool of relation, built through time, waiting, and trust. The work deliberately avoids the spectacular. What emerges instead is the fragile tension of the encounter, the density of a gesture, the quiet force of a gaze. Each portrait is the result of a shared moment, never staged, never taken without permission.
Post-production follows the same ethical discipline: minimal, essential, reduced to what is strictly necessary to preserve the integrity of light, skin, and expression.
In an era dominated by speed and surface, this project moves in the opposite direction. These images are conceived for physical space — for the wall, for the printed page — where time slows down and observation becomes an act of attention.
This work is part of The Human Encounter, an ongoing research on presence, identity, and the fragile boundary between the observer and the observed.
