Words For My Pictures

 It has been a year since I posted, which feels both short and long at the same time. It is like time moves fast when you get older, but at the same time slows down when a lot of things are happening throughout the year. 2025 is one of those years that feels like one, with many breaking news stories and new dramatic headlines in the never-ending barrage of the news cycle.  How do I cope with this fast-paced world? It feels like it is even moving faster, driven by AI. I try to continue to keep doing my healthy habits as much as I can, avoiding not to be pulled into the never ending vicious circle, seeing things as they are, but at the same time stay firm and committed into things I believe in.  I managed to exercise and be more active than the previous year, even if sometimes I have to drag myself to the gym or invite my girlfriend to join me as my workout buddy. I am also more conscious of what I eat and when I eat. I can not eat anything, anytime, and expect that there a...

It is another birthday that I do not celebrate but observe. It is like those national or international holidays that you mark or remember but still have to go to work. These days what I see is not how old I am but how long I have lived on this planet and how well. I would say, I have lived a good number of years surpassing the life expectancy of Ethiopia in 1974 which was shockingly only 39.45 for males. Yes, things have changed and Ethiopians are expected to live until 65. I live in the United States which has a higher life expectancy than Ethiopia even if it is one of the lowest for the highly developed economies of the world.  This makes me grateful and hopeful at the same time. It also motivates me to live more purposefully. I am learning to be more grounded, appreciate the moment, and feel the wonders of simple things. I am learning to enjoy simple things like riding a bike in pouring cold rain at 5:20 a.m in the morning feeling the cold rain washing my face and breathing in t...

  Reflection of a Half-Century  Part One 1973-1991 The average life expectancy of an Ethiopian is 67.81 years in 2023. It had been as low as 46.13 years in the 90s when war and the high infant mortality rate kept it low. An improvement was made in the 2000s when basic health services managed to reduce the high infant mortality rate. I am living in the United States now which has a life expectancy of 74 years for men. That means I have about two decades to enjoy planet Earth. I am at the beginning of an age where you have more stories to tell. So that is what I am going to do.  Self Portrait 2023. Keeping a tradition of Birthday Portrait.  My generation has gone through so much in a lifetime that life reflects our country’s break from thousands of years of tradition to stumbling into the unknown, experimenting with ideology and theories that had not been proven to work with the country.  I was born in December 1973 during the last days of the last Ethiopian Emper...

 Homelessness is one of the significant problems in cities across the United States. Especially cities of the west coast from southern California to the Pacific North West. The problem is causing a huge impact on daily activities within the municipalities.  When I moved to Seattle five years ago I was shocked to learn how many people are homeless and living on the street, in shelters, and in tents. Currently, around 13,000 are homeless in Seattle's metro area alone. It was and to some extent, it is still hard for me to understand why so many people are houseless in one of the richest countries of the world. 

 Another birthday portrait and time to reflect.  I no longer count my gray hairs or my wrinkles. It doesn't matter anymore how gray my hair is and how deep my crowfeet are. I am now comfortable with them and trying to gracefully age. Preparing my mindset for the few more decades I may have. To live purposefully and with some kind of meaning. As we get older the past is seen much clearer than the future (that is what makes us wiser as we age) so I go back and tell a story. A personal story.  I am just one birthday shy from living a half-century, Which takes me back 24 years ago when I turned 25. I remember marking my birthday in the middle of the night with a crescent moon over the horizon in the middle of a 53 km hike to St Gabriel Church at Kulubie. Here is the story of why I was there and why I did that hike.  My mother had a difficult pregnancy when I was conceived, she at least had one miscarriage before I was born and she was not feeling great about the pregnanc...

  I think making and appreciating music is one of the important characteristics to be human. Every society and community in the world makes and appreciates music. Most cultures use it as a way to express themself as an individual or collectively as a clan, tribe, race, etc whatever a group of people wants to categorize themself.  Capturing moments of people creating music in my pictures is important because I am able to freeze the moment of an artistic expression. Photos are static and music is dynamic but they can still reflect the dynamics of sound rhythms you find in music. Photos might not be able to capture the sound of a horn instrument but they can capture the energy and intensity of the artist blowing the horn. That is what I look for when I take a picture of a musician on stage.  They are thousands and thousands of amateur and professional concert photographers in the world who specialize in photographing musicians on stage. Some are hired to take pictures to rec...

 The first picture is a sunrise as seen from a window from the place I use to live in Addis Ababa in 2015. The second picture is a sunset at the Puget Sound a view from my apartment window in Lynnwood WA in 2020. 

  The central vegetable and fish market of Addis known in Amharic name Atkilt Tera is a vegetable and fruit whole sell market that used to be located in the heart of the city. It is a place where fresh produce comes from almost all corners of Ethiopia to be resold to small traders who in turn sell in small local markets that local juice bars and restaurants buy from. Some individuals with big families also come to buy in bulk to save money. For a reason, I don't know fish is sold in this market. It might be because some Orthodox Christance eats fish during lent where they abstain from meat and dairy products. It makes sense to have all items needed for the lent season in one place.  The fresh produce is collected from farmers from all over Ethiopia by merchants who travel to collect the harvest and sell it to another bigger merchant who sells it to whole sells in the capital.  The same product might be sold and bought multiple times before it reaches the city. The chain i...

 Whenever I pass a construction site here in the US. I always wonder how quiet it is compared to construction sites in Ethiopia where they are always loud and sometimes chaotic. Contractors in Ethiopia use a lot of unskilled manpower to compensate for the lack of machinery or high price to rent or buy them. It is relatively cheaper for them to hire people to work as laborers. The drawback is the laborers they hire are unskilled and are not productive as the contractors want them to be. To perform a simple task there needs to be a lot of commotion and shouting accompanied by whatever noise construction machinery on the site makes. On the other hand contractors in the US are highly dependent on machinery to minimize cost because unlike Ethiopia hiring people is expensive. The people they hire are highly skilled and much more productive than their Ethiopian counterparts. You will not see a lot of unskilled laborers doing manual tasks in the US instead you will see few high skilled co...

  I took another self-portrait to mark another birthday. A simple headshot to mark the effect of nearly a half-century of existence as Deresse.  I can hardly notice the subtle changes in how I look but I am sure they are changes because once you pass your growth stage there is no turning back. You slowly age every second. It is inevitable. Depending on what you believe you can pray and do good deeds for your afterlife but you can not reverse aging, getting old, and finally death.   Stoping to grow physically and the aging of your body doesn't mean that you stop growing as a person but you need to put an effort into that. If you are not open-minded and curious to learn your intellectual growth will also deteriorate. I try my best to learn and understand new things as much as I can. Trying to see the world and life from different perspectives. I would say that I am wiser than I was twenty years ago and want to be much wiser next year. This doesn't mean that I regrate f...

Thanksgiving is one of the major holidays celebrated by Americans. Although different thanksgiving ceremonies and rituals exist in different parts of the world the American thanksgiving is uniquely American.  When European settlers started settling in New England and the Northern East coast life was hard and harsh and every year they survived in the new land was a moment to be thankful especially when they had a good harvest.  This tradition of giving thanks continued to the present making  Thanksgiving holiday where families come together and celebrate with good food.  I had been in the US for many Thanksgivings now but never had the full experience until this year. Although I had all the traditional Thanksgiving foods during the previous holidays this year was my first to sit with a family for the traditional dinner. Like all human celebrations, there was a lot of food and drink and great conversations. This made me think that people in every corner of the world an...

  The vibrant colors of autumn are a great subject for photographers all over the northern hemisphere. We all have seen hundreds and hundreds of images of fall captured in almost every photography style you can imagine. From landscape to macro photographs the magical season is frozen in millions and millions of pictures every year. Unlike the pictures taken during the seasons, the orange and yellow leafs will fall and give way to the dark gray winter. That is the law of nature!  I didn't know how fall can be breathtakingly beautiful before I moved to the United States. Yes, I have seen many pictures of fall when I was in Ethiopia but I had never imagined that dying leafs will have such beauty. Even though I was not aware of the esthetics of a falling leaf I knew the importance of the symbolism associated with it. Thanks to O Henry's American Classic short story "The  Last Leaf "I was able to envision how a simple phenomenon can be associated with life and death. In hi...

  Here is a picture I took in an antic store in Seattle's Industrial District. For young people who don't know what the classic items in the photo are, they are an analog telephone and a typewriter. How these gadgets work is another topic and we will not go there. Every time I see the picture I go back in time and hear the distinctive sounds that each gadget makes. Those sounds are engraved in me and most of my generation's memories and some of us still cling to those sounds. I don't know anyone who looks back nostalgically to the sound of the typewriter unless maybe their parents were writers but many like me are still trying to hold on to the sound of the analog telephone by choosing "Old Phone" ringtone in our mobile phones.  It is strange how memories are stored in our brains. I still hear the typewriters clicking loudly whenever I remember my trips to the principal's office at school where the secretaries are usually typing the next test or exam. Thos...

 Simone Biles was in the news recently not for the usual reasons as she normally makes it to the headlines but for a different reason. Simone Biles withdrew from the US   Olympic gymnastic team. She sensed that her body and mind were not connected well which is very important for a gymnast. That connection is very important since that is the reason which enables athletes to perform complex movements safely.  Athletes at every level are trained to give all they have to their sport. They work hard to be the best in their sport with great discipline, dedication, and focus. Coaches encourage and demand athletes to give all they got and sometimes more than what they have.  When athletes become successful the pressure becomes greater, now they don't have it coming only from coaches and teammates but additional actors like media and sponsors come to play.  Athletes drive themself to the brink physically and mentally.  In a success-driven world of sport, athle...

 I recently visited Seattle Aquarium and I saw fishes and animals which live in rivers, seas, and oceans of the planet. The aquarium did its best to create a place that is close to the natural environment to all the fishes animals and plants as much as possible. Creating this kind of space is not only beneficial to the displayed living thing but also to the people who are visiting who can also see a natural habitat that is very close to the real thing. My visit and the pictures I took there triggered a question, Why do people keep wild animals in captivity?  I believe people had to keep wild animals in captivity first when they were trying to domesticate them for their food, transportation, labor, or emotional needs. Then after domesticating what they can, keeping undomesticated animals doesn't make sense but some people kept doing so for prestige or to harvest some parts of the animals. Animals are still kept in captivity for mainly three reasons now; conservation, education,...

The US is a country where different races are still segregated highly not anymore by law but by culture and economy. Races are separated by their neighborhoods, churches, music, and everything which helps them to be apart. Because of this people coming from different races hardly understand each other let alone empathize with a different race.  That is why last year's mass protest against the killing of Gorge Floyd in Miniapolice was unique. People coming from all races were equally outraged by the public killing done by a police officer who was indifferent to the death of a human being. The protests also show a new America made of young Americans who want to fight injustice united no longer bounded by the race they come from. Young Americans choose to protest not in support of a race cause but to stop injustice.  Children are not bounded to their race, a child's understanding of race comes later from grown-ups. Anywhere in the world, a child need is to be loved, taken care of...

Recently it was in the news that Seattle had more cloudless days in a week than last summer. It might be a very newsworthy story for a city which is known for its rain but the lack of clouds on the clear skies was not that great for me. Even though I enjoy bright sunny days as a photographer I prefer to have some clouds in the sky because that is what gives my pictures an interesting horizon. The news made me think about how clouds are important in my photography. Clouds are an important part of my composition whether I am shooting streets, cityscapes, or landscapes.  There had been great photographers who shot clouds for their photo project and I am sure there are contemporary photographers who still shoot clouds as their primary subjects. I had never committed myself to just photograph clouds only for a photo project but I like to take a picture of a sky that has clouds that makes it more dramatic and interesting. My favorite is combining the sky, water, and land in my landscape ...

The Covid 19 pandemic has changed a lot how we use public spaces for the past year. Some of the public spaces have been shut for more than a year now. Some are gradually reopening with limitations and precautions but they are not yet functioning as they were before the pandemic hit. One public space I miss as a photographer is the Seattle Central Library located in downtown Seattle. The library building is a huge 11 story glass and steel structure with an ultra-modern design.  Some might see the giant building as a grotesque modernist architecture and others like its functionality and futuristic look. Whatever opinions people have no one doubt that it is a unique iconic building. It attracts photographers and tourists alike from all over the world.  From the outside, it is hard to distinguish the shape of the library which may look like a big pile of glass and steel but once you are inside it transforms into a well-designed highly functional space.  Unlike traditional lib...

  What comes to your mind when you see a picture of a motorcycle? Mode of transportation, danger,   thrill, adventure, independence, rebel, and many words might come to you. Depending on which part of the world you live your view on motorcycles might be different from people in other parts of the world. For some, they are a necessity and for others, they are an indulgence.   Some people use motorcycles as means of transportation while others use them as a lifestyle choice. Motorcycles or motorbikes as some prefer to call them had been around since the late 1800s almost the same time as the motor car started to become a new way to move around. They are used in almost all parts of the world by people who use them for leisure or as their working tool. A lot has changed since the late 19 th century so has the design and capacity of the motorbike but what remains is the danger of motorcycles. I think the danger of riding a motorcycle is more or less the same if not more. Wi...