Mystic
Valley
By Alberto Del Hoyo
A
Junka Boy With Blue Eyes
Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II 160mm F/4 1/125s ISO400
lberto del Hoyo is a spanish
photographer based in the Canary
Island. His own curiosity for different
ways of living has brought him to
unfamiliar tribal territories of Asia,
South America and Africa searching for
the distinctive beauty and variety of its
people.
In 2015, he founded “Pics for Pills”,
a modest fundraising initiative with the only aim of collecting
medicines and medical supplies for the Omo Valley people in
Ethiopia. He believes protagonists of the photographs must be the
main beneficiaries.
"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart”
The Omo Valley encompases 69% of Ethiopia's 78 ethnic groups
that make up a large outdoor ethnographic museum. An orthodox
Christian country surrounded by an ocean of Islam; the only one
ever to be colonized; one of the poorest in the world and proud
warriors’ tribe that is full of tradition.
"The relocation of some tribes, such as the Konso or Mursi, which
is already taking place, is a part of the Ethiopian Government's
plan, supported by the World Bank, to resettle more than two
million people. Agriculture is their main source of survival and
ending the country's dependence on foreign food aid is what
they(Govt) are looking at. But it disparages these tribes, who
imagine themselves to be vagabonds, and want them to settle in
fixed communities and 'join the modern world'", says Survival
International, who denounces difficulties of survival of indigenous
people throughout the world.
Curiously, they say, the plan condemns the tribes to food
dependency and their disappearance. This is where the
dissemination of cultural diversity of the Omo Valley tribes is