Photojournalist Hanna Wondamegegn is Photographing Beyond Borders
Growing up as a second-generation immigrant in East Charlotte, North Carolina, Hanna Wondmamegegn was often troubled with the framing of the global migrant crisis by mainstream media. “Migrants are so much more than statistics or tokens of globalized poverty.” In 2017, news of the Libyan slave trade dominated European politics, stirring shockwaves of anti-refugee sentiments around the world. At the time, Hanna was scrolling onto BuzzFeed to ease her boredom when she came across a shocking headline that read, “Inside the country where you can buy a Black man for $400.” Some of the Black Africans were auctioned for as little as $200, depending on their statuture. Disturbed beyond relief, the images of Tripoli remain imprinted in her consciousness today.
Raised by a single mother, both of Hanna’s parents hail from Ethiopia. Though she was born in Virginia, her mother ultimately decided that they would settle in Charlotte. “I love to talk about my community because it shaped the photojournalist I am today. That community was vital in developing my worldview.” She describes East Charlotte as a cultural melting pot home to her neighbors of Somali, Eritrean, Cambodian, and Filipino descent. To Hanna, the sheer awesomeness of every day was her inspiration. As few common languages were spoken between households, food, storytelling, and music were the components that opened a window of communication. “This was my home, and my community where immigrants were the majority and the norm, and not minorities,” she says.
Hanna credits her “journalistic crisis” that erupted in high school as the catalyst responsible for her entry into photojournalism. By nurturing the budding global citizen within her, she began by contributing to the school newspaper. “My journalism advisor and the editor would get so frustrated because my drafts would be three times the length of the word limit I was given. The experience was challenging because I couldn’t condense someone's life history into a string of sentences.”. At college, Hanna majored in food studies and took her first photojournalism class in the fall of 2018. The connection to photography was an instant romance. “You know the saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words?’ This is the medium that allows me to capture the nuance that I personally struggled to achieve with words.''
Four years have passed since Hanna read the Buzzfeed article. Haunted by the vivid memories of the Tripoli auctions, she made a promise to use her photography as a medium to mobilize positive public perception towards migration. She embarked on a study abroad program to Italy as part of her food studies program. The first five weeks consisted of food nutrition classes based on Italian cuisine, while she planned to use the latter weeks to focus on her research project. “I specifically chose Italy for this program because I remember reading about how Africans who are sold into slavery are funneled into Italy.” Though that was her initial motivation for upending her college life and traveling abroad, Hanna also needed to reconcile her career prospects. “I needed to appreciate whether photojournalism is what I want to commit to. As much as I consider myself a global citizen, the conditions of this field require constant travel for short periods of time where you’re expected to produce a high quality of work.”
While documenting the Ethiopian refugees living in Rome, Hanna noted the stark differences between learning in a classroom setting and photographing on the ground- a revelation that isn’t always reflected in taught theory. She continued to experience the misogynoir that often obstructs Black women photojournalists from completing assignments in comparison to their white, male counterparts. “No bystanders or people took me seriously when I told them I was a photojournalist. As a Black woman in Europe, especially Italy, our fetishization and sexualization is a lot more frequent and explicit. One time, I couldn’t get access to a building and lost a story I was supposed to cover because I refused to go on a coffee date with a man,” she shares.
“The first question that some of the immigrants and refugees in Rome would ask me is why are you interested?” Hanna says. “There was so much neglect and lack of interest to directly hear their stories that the very thought that I, an American, traveled from thousands of miles away just to hear their stories shocked them.” Hanna believes that media coverage of refugees will continue to suffer a crisis of legitimacy due to the lack of nuance. “Because migrants narratives are often centred around hardship, who they were before or after the crisis in question is deemed irrelevant.” By breathing life into their narratives, and injecting cultural sensitivity into her work, she has since traveled to 13 other countries and was inspired to kickstart her ongoing personal project, Roots.
Our conversation reveals that Roots is inspired by the essence of being Habesha. Habesha, is a collective term to describe Eritreans or Ethiopians as a way to promote unity and appreciate our collective history.” In this project, there is no aestheticization of suffering to elicit empathy. Instead, one of the photos from the project includes pieces of silverware carrying roasted coffee beans, sugar, and coffee granules. At first glance, these are simply spoons resting on a bed of earth. Yet, from one African to another, the richness of this image communicates loss, family, culture, and sacrifice beyond the comprehension of the white western gaze.
This project forms part of a broader framework of Hanna’s intention to tell stories of Africa and the diaspora beyond. During the Black Lives Matter protests last year, Hanna noted a slight shift in the media’s attitudes from a politics of pity to a politics of dignity. However, there is still a lot of unlearning to do. “A lot of Black journalists have always been vocal about ethics in journalism; it’s only until recently that we’re being listened to. Representation is not about saying only a certain ethnic group should tell a story. The difference between viewership and voyeurism is more about what’s missing when you don’t allow different voices to tell a story.”
