The Photographer Fighting Visual Clichés of Africa

In the spring of 2016, the photographer Aïda Muluneh opened a solo exhibition at the David Krut Projects gallery in New York City. The showcase came nine years after Muluneh had returned to her native Ethiopia, which she’d left as a young child in the 1980s, during the height of the country’s punishing Marxist regime. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a series of photographs called The World Is 9, which drew its name from a saying of her grandmother’s: “The world is 9, it is never complete and it’s never perfect.” For an artist whose identity is wrapped up in her delayed repatriation, the impossibility of closure—in the lives of people and nations—has proved to be a powerful theme.

Muluneh’s work had attracted praise well before the 2016 exhibition. After attending middle and high school in Canada, she graduated from Howard University in 2000 and then worked as a photojournalist for . “Are you an artist, or are you a journalist?” her boss asked. Her work, which relied on a wide lens and gave confirmed her ascension to a thrilling, delicate post: one of Ethiopia’s reigning image-makers.