On Publishing Travel Photos and Stories for Posterity

I returned from my trip to Ethiopia on June 15. Six weeks later I have shared the photos and stories with many people and in many formats! I decided to take the time to be really organized and comb carefully through all of my photos (1,000+) to choose the best, and to place them in order and caption them to re-tell the story of my trip, my thoughts, experiences, and recollections. (See the highlights of my Ethiopia trip here.) After going on a number of trips over the past 3 years, I have learned that if I don’t do this right away, it just doesn’t happen. And then all my memories slowly slip away. I look at the photos 3 years later and wonder what I was thinking when I took them. So this time, I had a really strong sense of “it’s now or never” driving me to organize, annotate, and share. And having the ability to post everything online and share with friends across the globe was a great motivator too. There’s a real sense here of not just creating a record of my traveling experiences for me and my friends, but of contributing to a larger education (in the West) about the country and history of Ethiopia, as well as about the joy of travel.

This trip was also unusual because of my family connection to the country. Soon after I returned back to L.A., I gave a pecha kucha slideshow (20 slides, 20 seconds each) presentation about my trip and my dad’s life living there, in which I reconstructed some of his photos from the early 60s. That, in turn, inspired me to re-create the slideshow on Flickr. And then from there, I decided to create a book, which I published myself on Lulu.com, based on the pecha kucha: Connecting to History in Ethiopia, A Travel Reconstruction.

Retracing My Dad’s Steps in Ethiopia

On my recent trip to Ethiopia I took along with me some copies of the photos my dad took while he lived there in 1962-64. Dad lived in Addis and among his photographs were some images of the neighborhood he lived in. I got him to show me on a map before hand, and in Addis I set off on a quest to find the same locations and document them again. It’s really amazing how little things have changed there. The trees are bigger, and some short walls have been made taller, but that’s about it.

Below, left, is an image from 1964 of the walkway/alley leading to the house my dad lived in with his roommate, Charlie, seen in the photo. Access to the house (the one with the chimney) and its yard was through the gate behind Charlie. On the right, I am standing in front of the same gate in 2008 (less than 2 weeks ago). The same gate is there–they just added wood to the top section and painted it green.

Below are two images of the street leading up to this alleyway, at the top of the “70 steps”. The top image is from ca. 1964 (Dad’s camera had a much nicer lens on it than my little Cannon digital Elph), the bottom one from today. You can see the same stone wall to the right (extended upwards today), and even the same green shack on the right of the telephone pole (also the same!).