Photos are important. Photos are extraordinarily important. There are photos that have changed the world… literally. Then there are photos that can change lives.
And even still… there are photos that can make us remember that we actually did live.
My grandparents would have been married 59 years this year. Tonight, on Christmas Eve, my great grandparents – my great grandmother dying this year at 100yrs old – would have been married 83 years.
These images made with simple 35mm cameras, most without so much as batteries, captured lives and made us know that we once did live.
I’ve been contacted recently to attempt to find the image of the woman who now has become known as the Lalibela Stick Woman. She was featured in this blog back in May of this year. I photographed her on May 17th. That was the day she became immortal.
I’m not saying my photographs are worth calling such lofty words. I’m just saying: because she is now on a half a dozen hard-drives, archival DVD’s, a book and over a dozen 30-inch prints strewn from coast-to-coast in homes and galleries and coffee shops, the Lalibela Stick Woman has become immortal.
And she has become an icon. People can look at her and see something. I leave it to you to interpret what, but… whatever it is… you see something.
You don’t have to go to Lalibela, Ethiopia: taking a 9-hour flight to Amsterdam, then another to the Khartoum, Sudan… then another to Addis Ababa. Get on the tiny propeller plane and land in the middle of nowhere to drive 30km to where you MIGHT see her walking the winding hills and cobblestone streets of Lalibela.
You see her right there. You see the people of that place. Here she is.
I may never find her. I’ve got my feelers started out – first of all a doctor who knows a child in the town there. Where will it go from there, I do not know.
But she may be still there. She’s someone’s mother or grandmother.
So take LOTS of photographs. Its on my mind these days. Because you just never know who you may immortalize.
Stay tuned,
-Noah D.
