A Little Light on a Dark Continent
Lynn Doran’s “Omo” takes us deep into Ethiopia
Three years ago, Lynn Doran journeyed to the remote Omo Valley, situated within the Great Rift Valley of Southwest Ethiopia, and photographed six indigenous peoples. That was just before construction began on the Gibe III dam which has already altered tribal life downstream. As they say, Those days are gone. Three weeks ago the Palos Verdes resident published “Omo,” with approximately 144 mostly full-page images, and it is a splendid book from beginning to end. Tonight, Thursday, there is a reception and signing at the Klaus Center for the Arts in San Pedro.
A true sense of adventure
One could say that Lynn Doran has had the travel bug for over 60 years.
“In the ‘50s, my parents took my brother and I down to the heart of Mexico, pulling this travel-trailer. My parents had this true sense of adventure. Seeing the people there at that young age left a big impression on me and, to this day, I remember things that I saw there.”
Lynn Doran, photo
Doran is a South Bay native. She was born in Inglewood but lived with her family in Palos Verdes from the time she started grade school to the time she graduated from PV High and left for college.
After a year at the University of Colorado, which didn’t have an art department, Doran transferred to Long Beach State, which did. And that’s where she earned her art degree.
However, with her schooling complete, she began making ski accessories, which were carried by little ski shops. Because she knew how to sew, Doran then formed “Natty,” which specialized in tennis and golf apparel. The business lasted some 30 years and did well.
Running a company, Doran’s travels were limited. “When I got out of my company in 2000,” she says, “I went, Okay, now’s my opportunity to go explore more.”
Not that the travel bug had ever skipped out on her. Even during college she was traveling to Mexico and collecting folk art.
“That’s where my collection actively started. It was still dirt roads in those towns back then. They weren’t commercial at all.”
Doran’s first real folk tour occurred in the late 1990s, and soon she was headed to Africa and New Guinea. In those days, she explains, “you could still field collect, (which) means you go into a village and actually buy from the people there. (But) field collecting, even in this short time of 16 years, is gone. It’s done. It’s very difficult to find a good piece out in the village anymore.
“The most prized or collectible pieces are the ones that people actually use. I try not to buy anything that was made for a tourist. You’re not always successful.” Sometimes she’ll have her acquisitions appraised after returning home: “Was I taken on this one or is it really authentic? Normally it’s authentic.”
Doran then recounts a trip to Indonesia. For most people, she says, getting to Bali is an effort and a destination in itself. But for her, it was only a starting point from which she embarked on a three-week boat trip from Bali across the entire archipelago of islands to Papua New Guinea.
“It was fascinating. We never saw another tourist, another boat, another anything. We would take little tin boats and go to the islands, but we always had our main boat with our cabins and food and water to come back to. And the air conditioning, because most of these places you go are brutally hot and humid.”
She returned three years later, but by then the inhabitants of these remote islands had modern devices. “As we’re (coming ashore), taking pictures of them, they have their cell phones taking pictures of us.” She pauses. “Like, wow, changing fast.”
The passion for collecting has been a sort of prelude: Doran’s love of tribal art or folk art led her to “exotic” places where she was in turn intrigued by the people who made these objects. In the case of her visit to Bali, she found some pieces that astonished her. She looked at them and thought, “Wherever this comes from, I’m going there.”
But it’s never as simple as hopping into the car with a full tank of gas.
“You have to find somebody to get you there,” Doran says. How do you do that? “You talk to people, and you start networking. It’s a very small group of people who travel where I travel.” And finding the right guide with all the right arrangements can take months or even years. But Doran isn’t a quitter: “I realize I’m an adventure travel junkie.
“I just started looking at the most indigenous cultures that were still intact. That’s the key, it’s still intact and they live the way they’ve lived for thousands of years. And it’s disappearing quickly.”
The road seldom taken
She didn’t train as a photographer, but her art background helped give Doran an eye for composition and detail. Plus she applied herself to learning how best to use the camera to capture images from the places she was traveling to.
“I have my style,” she says. “I don’t have a tripod; I like to shoot on the fly. I take portraits mainly; I’m not a landscape photographer. I like the feelings; I just like the feel of people, and capturing the moment.
“I hope, and people have told me, that the feelings come through in my photos. That means the most to me.”
Other photographers, she’s noticed, have not been above embellishing their work, in some cases bringing along makeup artists from Europe or staging certain scenes. “That’s not what I want,” Doran says. “I want to show authentic stuff.”
She’d gone to Africa previously, and she’d photographed wild animals, too. “But then I saw some photos of the people in the Omo Valley. That was why I wanted to get to Ethiopia. It was like, ‘Oh man, these people still live like this? I have to see them.’ So I worked three years to get this trip, and (meanwhile) I’m hearing that this dam is going to be built and you’ve got to get there because the tribes are going to be disbanded.”
After that, Doran knew, “authentic” was likely to turn into “displacement.”
In fact, she points out, “About 18 months to two years ago the Hamar tribe (one of the six she visited) and the government started fighting, killing each other. I heard that from three different people that have traveled into the Omo quite a bit. And they said, It’s totally changed.”
In 2013, Elizabeth Hunter of Survival International was quoted in the Telegraph as saying, “The Ethiopian government rides roughshod over the rights of the Omo Valley tribes, and is now embarking on a disastrous programme to forcibly resettle them.”
Doran traveled to the Omo Valley in a group of seven, their guide being a white Kenyan named Steve Turner. They began in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, visited a 14th century Christian town and an old walled city that was entirely Muslim, before entering the Omo Valley, which is largely pagan. The journey lasted three weeks, and it would not be stretching it to say that it was as much a journey through time as it was a journey through space.
In her book, Doran quotes the anthropologist Wade Davis: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”
The eight tribes of the Omo Valley, with a total population of about 200,000, is a model of reality under siege. The hydroelectric dam will bring new development, new people, hotels and tourism. One’s not unaware of the fact that even the brief presence of a small outside group entering the tiny villages of the Surma, the Nyangatom, the Dassanech, and so on, is a harbinger of what’s to come.
What Doran photographed will be adulterated if not lost. She writes: “Vivid face and body painting, piercing, scarification for decorative, heroic, ritual and medicinal purposes are exaggerated by elaborate head and hair decorations.” And then she shows us these things.
Two of the tribes still use lip plates, six inches in diameter, to enhance a young girl for marriage. Plates slightly smaller are sometimes inserted into the earlobes. Carved or painted, in this region the body is an open canvas and a work of art.
But will (or have?) the reactions of outsiders make them self-conscious of their difference?
Some of the images in Doran’s book would benefit from captions, for example the “bull jumping,” which is a coming-of-age test for a young man, and entails hopping up on and running across the backs of several (at least four) bulls. If the lad falls, it’s bad news. This is preceded by a ritualized whipping of women to the point where their backs bleed and will scar. This is so that the young bull jumper will know that these women were there for him in his youth, and so he should be there for them in their dotage.
It’s another world, another reality, all right, and Doran took close to 4,000 photos before culling them to less than 150 in order to convey the essence of what she saw and experienced.
“There’s something about the Omo Valley,” she says. “There was a feeling there that was so special and this is some of the best photographic work I think I’ve ever done. But it’s the people, they were so wonderful. How can you go wrong? They were it.”
And they, and their customs, are endangered. That, Doran says, was her motivation for going.
“They’re just beautiful people, and all of their creativity comes out in their adornment. Maybe that’s what I like. Maybe it was their creativity that grabbed me so much.”
On being told that she certainly captured that on film, she smiles: “Good.”
Presented by Marymount California University Arts & Media, “Omo: Tribes of the Omo Valley” is an art talk and reception for Lynn Doran taking place this evening, Dec. 1, at the Klaus Center for the Arts, 430 W. Sixth St., San Pedro. Photographs will be displayed. At 6 p.m., an introduction by Marymount President Dr. Lucas Lamadrid is scheduled, to be followed by a Q&A with the photographer. From 6:30 until 9 p.m. she’ll be signing copies of “Omo.” Information about the book, as well as Doran’s graphic art and other photography, can be found at lynndoran.com. For information about tonight’s event, contact BWade@marymountcalifornia.edu or EPerry1@marymountcalifornia.edu. ER
