Getachew Admase: A life in photography

If you’ve opened a magazine or newspaper in the past couple of decades, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen the work of Getachew Admase. The 71-year-old Ethiopian photo journalist has photographed portraits of many people, both famous and unknown – royalty, authors, artists, actors, and leading businessmen as well as “ordinary people” in a series of work reports for publications such as for Addis Zemen, the Ethiopian Herald and the defunct Ethiopia Mirror, Menen, Yekatit. His subjects include Emperor Haile Selassie, Prime Minster Aklilu Habte wolde, President Mengestu Haile Mariam, renowned statesman and author Haddis Alemayehu, poet and painter Gebre Kirstos Desta, and another painter Afewerk Tekele. In his more than five decades of work, Getachew has documented Ethiopia’s ethnic and religious diversity, as well as important events in the country’s modern history, both before and immediately after the 1974 revolution. In an era when photographers faced many technical disadvantages, he started with a Roller Flex camera and did not use a Nikon until the 1990s.

(Haddis Alemayehu, author of the Ethiopian classic Fikir Eske Mekabir and a statesman who served as Ethiopia’s representative to the UN.)