Bio

Geremew Tigabu is an accomplished documentary photographer based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With over nine years in the field, Geremew is recognized for his evocative images that capture the human experience. His career started as a freelance photographer before he became a photojournalist at Fortune, a leading Ethiopian newspaper. Following this, he co-founded Stops Creative Communication Plc, where he worked as an Art Director, gaining experience in creative strategy. Today, Geremew works independently, bringing together artistic skill and journalistic focus.

His work has achieved significant national and international recognition. These achievements include participating in the highly regarded NY Times Portfolio Review and the 2025 Lagos Photo Festival. He has also exhibited at major venues, including the Addis Foto Fest (2016), the Young African Photographers exhibition (Alliance Ethio Francaise, 2018), and the Lagos Photo-Home Museum (2020). Geremew won the Celebrate Africa Photography Competition (2017) and was shortlisted for the Ugandan Press Photo. Furthermore, his project, Eye of the Storm, was shortlisted for the prestigious CAP Prize 2023. An active member of the African Photojournalism Database (APJD), his photographs have reached a global audience, featuring in publications and platforms such as The Guardian, Wired, CNN, and World Press Photo. Through his lens, Geremew tells powerful stories, showcasing the complexity of life in Ethiopia and beyond.

geremew tigabu
@ghost_ti

Eye of the Storm
Project statement

It has been just over a year since the conflict in Ethiopia broke out. So much destruction: thousands perished and properties destroyed, reduced to rubble.

During the early days of the conflict, I watched my mother’s anguish and pain, hidden largely to the outer world. But it was there and watching as grief seeped into her was a difficult reality to live through. As the war expanded into northern Ethiopia affecting my father and another part of my family, so did the heartbreak. As war enveloped Ethiopia, so it did my family as well.

Incessantly checking the news on YouTube and on the TV screen, existing in an era of lies manufactured by media, living in uncertainty, swimming in multitudes of ‘what-ifs’, has become our normal. Then there are the nuances and the fast-paced development of reality. How does one process it? How does one place themselves in it all? There is the communal pain, the communal awareness of the reality in Ethiopia but then there is the individual experience. Where do you place your self in it? How do you translate yourself in all that is evolving?

Solitude.