Modern storyteller, committed photographer, relentless traveler… Guillaume Bonn offers an exploration of Addis Ababa, Ethiopian capital, photographed from an iPhone.
Cosmopolitan with a wild cultural richness, Addis Ababa is at times ultramodern, at times permeated with a poetic obsolescence. The heart of this city beats to the rhythm of construction sites that pepper the urban space: apartments in ruins versus recent constructions, omnipresent scaffolding…
The richness of its Art Deco architecture mixes, not without a little resistance, with the newly emerging buildings. A surprising metropolis characterized by contrast, Addis Ababa and its population are undergoing huge changes. Everywhere, traditional dress meets Europeanized additions. Here and there, Guillaume captures moments of stolen life that highlight startling ruptures between yesterday and today, between wealth and poverty.
Vintage driving gloves abandoned on a car seat, a shiny VW bug parked on a barely cemented track, major roads set in concrete, dirt roads, new telephone booths, then a bunch of rubble in the middle of the pavement… Later, we discover a pool where children play, a fitness center, an internet café. And suddenly, on the wall, a weathered lithograph representing Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam as a mockery of the (re)creation of Addis!
Inseparable from its cultural and political heritage, the “New Flower” of the African continent unveils itself throughout the pages. Taken between 2014 and 2016, the story of this photographic adventure is inextricably linked to the legacy left by the communist regime from the 1970s, where the deprivation of liberty echoed the fear of photography and espionage. To be free…
To convey a message, Guillaume Bonn chose the use of an iPhone as his technique. This medium allowed him to trace his field of vision. The grain is a bit faded, the colors are warm. Effective, discreet, quick and instantaneous, the iPhone gave him a lot of freedom to capture moments that will, without a doubt, never happen again.
Guillaume Bonn creates a portrait of a lively and energetic city that outdoes itself in order to have a more prosperous future. At the mercy of the pages, we allow ourself to embark into the moving and luminous whirlwind of “City Portraits”.
Guillaume Bonn, Addis Ababa
Published by Be-Pôles Editions
Portraits de Villes Collection
