Being Present: Michael Tsegaye in Addis Ababa

Abstract This essay examines Michael Tsegaye’s series Future Memories and Chasms of the Soul, underscoring not just the socio-political context of the work, but the possibilities of photography itself. Addressing the displacement occurring when neighborhoods and cemeteries were razed to accommodate urban redevelopment in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the photographs tell the stories of these events, making present absences; in doing so, they open up present moments. Visually analyzing the photographs and drawing on theories of presence, place, absence, and memorialization, I center my argument on the temporal possibilities of the photographic moment. To argue this, I offer realignments in how presence and the present might be conceptualized in photography to enable a “being present”. Such reorientation is dependent upon the relation of the photographer to the subject matter and the viewer to the photograph, as well as the photograph’s relation to time.