Tag: Eric Gottesman

Unless you were already familiar with the work of US-based photographer Eric Gottesman and the Sudden Flowers media collective in Ethiopia he helped start in 2000, their images–which are produced collaboratively, blurring fact, fiction, education, art, and community activism–would probably not be the kinds of photographs you would conjure up. It is precisely that Sudden Flowers is able to surprise without succumbing to the lure of shock that they offer important insights and showcase an expanded process that goes far beyond traditional documentary photography.

Over the past fifteen years in a neighborhood in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a group of young people that came to call themselves Sudden Flowers worked with me to make photographs that represented the experiences they endured in their short lives. These often included various forms of trauma: the loss of parents, physical abuse, life on the street, psychological distress, the impact of poverty and disease. Though their lives were connected by proximity and common experiences, each of them had unique stories to tell and unique ways of telling them.