Trying to focus on the images that mattered most on this 2013 trip to the Western coffee regions of Ethiopia, as well as the South.
This is a set of images from my recent trip to EthiopiaEthiopia, formerly known as Abyssinia, or a coffee cultivar: Ethiopia, or more specifically the Empire under Haile Selassie, was known as Abyssinia. The name is Latin, derived from... ...more, and instead of trying to represent everywhere I went, I focused only on images I wanted to caption, ones I thought were worth making notes about. Hence … “Ethiopia worth writing about. ”
I have been on trips where I take 1000s of photos … too many in a way. I overwhelm myself. So I took a different tact this time: Quality not quantity.
As I have traveled a fairly broad path, that changes over time. I look for things that provide exceptions, or image matter that “hooks” me, that I find myself taking over and over.
I look for something out of order, or things that make me ask “why.” I have also taken a step into some rather arbitrary camera techniques, mostly just to amuse myself and prevent boredom, but with some results I feel are justified the circumstances of the exposure. -Tom
Ethiopian Coffee Trek:
I take a lot of pictures on trips of interesting-looking people I will probably never see again. I will see Beyene again though. He is a Senior Business Advisor working with a non-profit to guide coffee cooperatives toward success. He advises several key coops we work with in the Agaro district. 
I’m always trying to gauge the quality of life in areas we buy coffee. It’s not easy to do, it’s not an educated judgement, but I’m somehow driven anyway to try to understand daily life in places where, in the bigger picture, I spend very little time and truly don’t know anything of daily life. Regradless, seeing children with books, going to school, means something to me, rather than seeing them working on coffee farms or in other agriculture. It seems even more pertinent to see girls going to school. Cooking tibs, which are rough cut chunks of meat (lamb in this case) at Duromina cooperative, where we camped the night before. Interestingly, this is breakfast. I guess meat for breafast isn’t something you find only in the midwest USA. I was a snob; I ate muesli. The hand with coffee cherry; it’s one of the cliches of every coffee web site. But there is something so singularily different about the hands of rural people, that shows a life of rough work. I am not above cliche. 
The coffee ceremony in Ethiopia isn’t religious; it’s simply a matter of hospitality. The coffee is crudely roasted, and ground and brewed immediately after roasting. Somehow it all works out and tastes wonderful. Maybe its the human element. Mature coffee trees near the Duromina coopertive. Even when coffee trees are planted in an organized way, they are not intensively farmed in terms of pruning or fertilization. While beautiful, they don’t produce much. And while that might work in Ethiopia, as people need to make more money to make coffee farming sustainable, each shrub needs to produce more. It’s a future issue. Roasted in a pan over charcoal, the coffee comes out incredibly scorched. If your home roasted coffee came out looking with this I would say you have a big problem, and could expect skunky off notes in the cup. I love taking pictures of kids when I travel. And I often take them mostly in order to show them the picture of the view screen of the camera. But I rarely want to use them on our site, because I do use imagery to sell coffee. I also look at children on trips as good indicators of how well people are doing in a particular area. In the West, where we buy a lot of coffee, I see better general conditions. In the South, things seemer rougher, and this often shows in athe activities and appearance of the kids. THis fellow, wearing massive adult shoes, presents something ambivalent: He has shows, even though it’s less than ideal. But then again those are imported ideals I carry with me… There’s the flies. To me thats not ugly, or sad, or tragic. It’s distrubing only in that I wouldn’t like or tolerate the feeling of flies in my mouth or nose or eyes. But that’s not me. And this distinction is an important part of the experience of travel, or balancing preconceptions and judgments with an open-minded willingness to experience and learn. Outside the cooperative, women were selling tubs of home made beer, a local grain based fermented beverage. They all seemed to be drinking a bit of it too, because everyone was quite cheery (pun intended, since it was at the gates of Chiri coop.) So You Know … if you are under 14 and you are tired of your parents and they won’t let you have a cell phone or get a driving permit, don’t think you can go to Kaffa Ethiopia and get a job at Chiri cooperative either, because you can’t. While I have had the pleasure of many coffee services in rural Ethiopia, I had never seen local-made bamboo cups before. It’s just something … Women who were selling local beer to coffee farmers who had just been paid at the Chiri Coop. The women seemed to have taken a little tipple, but some of the children were also given the brew as well An Ethiopian orthodox priest and assistant take donations by the roadside. This is not uncommon, and they usually accept monies in ornate, colorful velvet umbrellas, but you don’t often see a priest in full dress. This was on a remote road, at a heady 3000 meters as well. 
I was playing with muliple exposures on my camera, and was also using the dynamic range feature on the phone for the same effect. I liked the results. They relieve my boredom on long drives and seem appropriate for the non-encounter of the car-pedestrian passing. Vultures and Hyena both come when they toss out the kitchen compost at this lodge in the South. I am sure dogs would come too, except they Hyena would just make a meal of them… On our way toward Bale Mountain area, not on a route I have been on before, we came across this cemetary. The people of the area are Oromia or Sidama, but I had not seen burials like this before, which suggest a more nomadic, or herding people to me. It was not a special site, just by the roadside. But it seemed ancient, as some of the carving on the stones appeared to be. I was experimenting with multiple exposures a lot of the trip. It seemed appropriate for images taken out of a moving car. It seemed to say “I’m not really here for you, and you aren’t really here for me.” It captures the ephemeral nature of the image and of the movement of passing encounter. 
How clothes are displayed has always amused me. These human parts that are supposed to make them more attractive, but also make body parts seem more like meat suspended at a butchers. I can’t see someone looking at a torso, and saying to a friend “that would look good on you”. It just doesnt seem to relate to human beings. Near Bolga, Sidama, someone’s trip came to an end. Oddy it was left right in the middle of the road, not even pushed to the side. Who was it that abandoned a car that nobody would touch, strip to the bare metal, or at least vandalize and roll onto it’s side? Some of the multiple exposures I was playing with resulted in rather subtle and hyperreal abberations in the images. As the camera attempted to overlay parts it could recognize, it also failed, which became amusing in the arbitrary way it could not recognize the image space. Is it only that light and clouds and the sun are so amazing when you travel, because it’s simply amazing in a differernt way than it is at home? I happen to think so. It’s not that I don’t see the suns rays in the bay area, but you see and appreciate natural differences; that we don’t get clouds like that, low in the sky and severly opaque. Teddy is a player, exporting Ethiopian coffee, flush with cash, excited, and possibly running a risk of gaming the coffee system. 2013 will be a big year for Teddy, one way or other. Cooking some coffee in a back room at Gelena Abaya in Kochere, Yirgachefe. Welcome to the Ethiopian rural kitchen. It’s a campsite. A private mill isn’t what you might think. It’s simply not a cooperative, and they are not allowed to export coffee. I have been using some techniques to take images in fading light, and they create a rather hyper-real exposure range One of thos photos of a person I will never see again, who is motivated perhaps only by the strange and occasional presence of a faranji (foreigner) and something out of the ordinary. I used 2 exposures on this image… 
The room for the mill manager at Gelena Abaya mill, in a rather nauseating turquoise tone. The iphone either has a focal plane shutter, or the digital equvalent. The result is that as the shutter travels across the sensor while the camera is in motion (from a moving car) it creates distortion. I like this, because in a sense it represents the speed of the passing encounter, or non-encounter. As an in-camera effect, the hidh dymanic range attempts to overay images, which I attempt to defeat in order to see what interesting outcomes might result. A multiplication of cheap goods for sale Disassociated imagery appears in bulk t-shirts distributed to far flung places, like the rural South of Ethiopia. Carrying wet parchment from the mill to the screens on a hot day, a thankless and low paying job at a private mill. If the idea of children comes from Victorian culture and is handed down in our humanitarian standards, then we can assume rightly that Ethiopians were not proper Victorians. If parents decide children need to work and not go to school, they do. Here, picking up parchment that drops from the beds at a private mill in the south Photos with self-referential shadows is so, like, 1980s. I was there too, what is excluded from the frame is re-introduced to the frame, the photographer is no longer the unspoken and invisible presence. But it is beautiful too. Fermenting coffee at Chelelektu A travel partner was excited to hear them sing work songs at the mill as the scrubbed the coffee in the channels. I wondered that they might be singing "this job sucks, my arms hurt, i wish i was getting paid more …" It’s so easy to be a romantic. Cleaning coffee is a lot of hand labor, and while its not great work, it employs a lot of people in an area of chronic unemployment. There was something painterly about the way these women had arranged themselves to get a look at me. It leads me to think… I photograph them because of their beauty, their head wraps which are simply protection from the sun, and that I am invested in the coffee process. They look back because I am curious, I am probably with the boss, and they probably wonder why I am interested to photograph them. At the massive Dumerso mill in Yirga Cheffe. Me looking at you looking at me. Coyness and framing the eye, like I frame the eye with my camera. Pedestrians of Sidama, a collage of several exposures. It captures the activity, the social business of the streets of rural Ethiopia, without preserving the identities of the persons represented, and somehow that seems about right to me, a passer-by.
