The magazine of the art-form of the photo-essay
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
Jan 2016 back issue
by Matilda Temperley
Omo: Change in the Valley illustrates the beauty and diversity of the people living
in the Omo Valley, as well as bringing into focus the threat to their way of life.
Driven by a government keen to encourage multinational, industrialised farming
the Valley’s inhabitants are being displaced.
Commercial farms combined with the new hydroelectric dam on the Omo River will
have a potentially devastating impact on the ecology of both Ethiopia’s Omo Valley
and Kenya’s Lake Turkana Basin. This striking collection of images is captioned
with words from the subjects and is a stark reminder of the casualties and
complexities that we face in the modern world.
The fate of the Omo Valley was sealed in 2006 when, upstream of the valley’s
arterial Omo river, the Ethiopian government began constructing the ‘Pride of
Ethiopia’: the highly ambitious and controversial Gibe III hydroelectric dam. As well
as allowing for large-scale commercial farming through irrigated agriculture, Gibe
III stands to make Ethiopia a major energy exporter. Since its inception the dam
has been controversial.
Gibe III began to produce power in October 2015. It has been described as a potential humanitarian disaster for the
estimated 500,000 people who live along the Omo River, and around its terminal Lake Turkana.The potential outcomes
of the dam have also been likened to one of the world’s worst ecological disasters; the shrinking of the Aral Sea. This is
because the agriculture associated with the dam is expected to considerably decrease the river flow and therefore the
volume of Kenya’s Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world. In addition, the increase in lake salinity and the
decrease in the nutrient-rich annual floods are likely to cause food shortages which will increase the risk of armed inter-
ethnic conflict over grazing land. Because changing weather patterns often cause drought and starvation, it is clear
that even a small change in the environment could have catastrophic impacts here.
This is in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia before a stick fight (Donga). It is a ritualised fight between villages and individuals
and the boys describe it as a game 'like football,' although there are often serious injuries and sometimes deaths. This
image is a moment of calm before the fight began and the sunlight coming through the dust makes it soft and
enhances the stillness. During this Donga, I strayed too close to the action and the backlash of one of the 10 foot long
sticks turned my forehead black for a week.
Suri family near Kibish 2010. Suri women commonly wear ceramic or wooden lip plates although the practice is
becoming less frequent.
