Nasede Intro
After three long days of hellish driving we pause and a AK-47 camo-clad guard, high on khat, jumps into the front seat of our Landcruiser. We continue to descend into the basin of the Omo River Valley. The Sudanese border is a few kilometers due south and skirmishes are a real and tangible problem.
I’m here in my capacity as a photographic tour guide and I’ve done this stretch of road many times before. It’s at this moment, though, that for my clients things begin to feel real. It’s achingly hot. It’s dusty. They’re tired and wired.
Signs of so-called Westernization quickly disappear, the road gets progressively worse (if that is possible) and after another hour or two we near the small village of Kibbish. It’s difficult to know how the people who live here - so cut off from the world - know we’ve arrived. But they do, and kids in different states of adornment come running to meet our vehicle. Pops of color burst from the drab surroundings like fireflies in the night sky.
The kids are from the Surma tribe and the decorations - many of which you see in the photographs here - are made from whatever they can find in the fields and bushes around their scattered village compounds.
They want their photographs taken. They know well that said photograph comes with a payment. They’ve done this before.
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This series of portraits was taken between 2016 & 2020 in Ethiopia’s southern Omo Valley.
Depending on where you draw the line, there are as many as two dozen different tribes that live in the south Omo, some numbering tens of thousands and others numbering no more than 500. Each one of them culturally unique. They coexist with varying degrees of peace.
As roads to the area have opened over the past decade tourism there has flourished. Tour companies sell the area as a wilderness untouched by the Western world and filled with exotic tribes. This is, ofcourse, far from the truth and the entire region is an at-risk eco-system balancing ever so delicately.