CatchLight Africa Masterclass

The most important quality we seek when choosing a CatchLight Fellow is a generosity of spirit—a deep desire to improve the field of visual storytelling through leadership, knowledge sharing, innovation and, of course, the highest quality images. 

One Fellow who exemplifies these qualities is Aida Muluneh.

Q&A with Aida Muluneh

By Abby Connolly, CatchLight

Can you tell us a little about the origin of your student workshops? What made you decide to launch these masterclasses?
We’re living in a continent where a lot of things are happening. I was one of the first people doing street photography saying ‘OK, we need to document these changing faces of our nation.’ We don’t need people to fly in to tell our own stories. Photography has political Impact, it has economic impact, it has social impact and for me, it’s important to be at the lead of our own narrative.

The key challenge is looking at the development of the industry in my own country. When I came back to Ethiopia in 2007, I felt it was important to teach. The easiest thing is to have my work on white walls in museums, the most challenging thing is helping emerging talents.

A lot of times young people are looking for that catalyst, that opportunity to open their minds. My main job is to open their minds for them and for them to understand the full spectrum of what photography is. 

After now teaching these workshops for some time, what have you learned? What are your key takeaways?
These students give me great energy. The students end up feeding back into remotivating me and it’s been really an exciting process. Over time, we’ve seen a complete shift of when they submitted, when they did their first second or third assignment and so forth; and they start to see things differently. This process has been, for me, quite amazing.

Students that I have trained have entered the international market. In the long term, I expect them not to be the best in Ivory Coast or Uganda, I expect them to be the best in the world. We need to compete on that level, in the global audience. It’s really about how we create a leader out of you and how we get you through the process and into your future career. 

What are you learning about which opportunities are missing and which ones are strong for emerging photographers if they want to stay and work on the continent? 
The missing link for me that I understood is there needs to be lessons on the business side of photography and understanding how to promote the market yourself because that’s the biggest game — you can have great images but if you don’t know how to promote yourself then you’re not professional and really not getting that far. 

At the end what I’m trying to make them understand is they need to decide if they are going to have a short term career or a long term career. A long term career requires proper planning, you can’t open a business without having a plan. So since this is one of those crafts that you can just pretty much pick up a camera and consider yourself a photographer, the success of a photographer now really depends on understanding the market fully — not just by creating the content but by understanding how everything functions.    

What do you see as the next step in building out this infrastructure for new storytellers and artists?
I need to open a school, that’s basically what it comes down to. I realized that the way that I’m teaching, it’s more than a text-book teaching, the rest is about how to think about photography and how to use it as a tool of self expression. So far the experience I’ve had with the students is that they need more time to develop and this is why building a school is going to be that key factor. I’ve been teaching for a long time and I’ve seen how that transfer of knowledge has made an impact on a lot of photographers. 

What are some things you would say to young photographers and possible future students who would be interested in your masterclasses?
I’m in museums not because someone saw me on Instagram, because I’ve done the work, I’ve built collections. Opportunities lead to other opportunities. I’m bringing them international attention so the kind of students I’m looking for are the ones where I say jump, they just tell me how high. 

And that’s how the success of the Ethiopian photographers who are already in the pipeline has looked — they basically follow the lead of the long term agenda and now I get messages five years later like ‘you know, we didn’t understand at that time, we were immature, but now we understand what you were trying to tell us, what we need to do with our careers.’ That’s all I want, to me, the more photographers we have in the pipeline, solid photographers, the better we can have an impact on the industry.

How has this pandemic impacted how you view your role as an educator and catalyst for change? What challenges, opportunities, value shifts, etc. has it brought up in your work?
I think the future is virtual and I believe as Africans we need to virtually exist with as much content as possible. At the beginning of this whole Covid thing everyone was like ‘oh Africa is going to go hell, this and that, but you know we fared up quite well — things didn’t stop; we had to move forward. And actually the bigger challenge that we faced was not really Covid but because it was elections in the midst of us trying to get the workshop together. It was challenging for the students because they couldn’t really be out there, I mean people were coming out with machetes we’re not talking about demonstrators with flags and red hats, so that created a fear in the students. So we had to push through that. But my point is that these challenges come up and we have to find ways around it, and really navigate to make things happen. 

What is clear to me is that we have to have our voices in there in this moment of history to document what we can and the virtual thing is so key. We need to have a stronger consistent presence online that continuously pumps out work from emerging talent.