The Names We Bear by Yodith Dammlash

Issue 136

The Names We Bear is an ongoing series of digital collages using photographs of my mother’s family in Ethiopia dating back as early as the 1940s to the 1970s. I’ve collected and archived over 300 photographs, negatives and slides, majority of which were retrieved from a box of materials left behind by my uncle, and used my family’s oral history along with my own imagined reality of the subjects, some of whom I’ve never met, as the basis for selecting which images to combine and superimpose. Not many people of my parent’s generation in the Diaspora have this wealth of old photographs, due to lack of resources or the displacement of personal items during exodus.

Reworking these images allows me to make sense of the stories I’ve been told over the years, from the overall charmed youth my mother’s family had to the inevitable tragedies experienced during displacement, as well as add depth and body to previously flattened perspectives of the Diaspora.

Yodith Dammlash lives and works in Washington, DC, USA.
To view more of Yodith’s work, please visit her website or find her on Instagram @yodithd