The flow of the collection is guided by immersive environmental images, landscapes, and classic still life. Interspersed into the narrative are thoughtful portraits, all photographed within the same “nomadic studio tent” the team built and took across the country. The portraits have a familiarity that only a decade of commitment to a single project can produce. The subjects are introduced by name. One spread of the book shows the same girl, Gure, photographed nearly ten years apart. On the book cover is a rare portrait of Fentale and Woday, two Kereyu men who travel to the market once a week to trade camels and try to meet potential wives with their carefully crafted hairstyles. There is Captain Amsale, a charismatic pilot of Ethiopian Airlines—the first to fly internationally with an all-female flight crew. Deeper within the book, we meet Mories, one of the last remaining subsistence crocodile hunters of the Dassanach, whose nomadic existence is kept alive by following the legends of their ancestors.
These seemingly disconnected cultural threads are woven together masterfully in order to truly see Ethiopia—which itself is the sum of all the diverse lands and the proud people who inhabit it.
