Omo Valley Portraits
Matilde Simas is an award winning documentary photographer who has traveled extensively to bring a deeply humanistic viewpoint to difficult subjects like sexual trafficking and forced marriage. Since joining the Limb Kind Foundation as staff photographer in 2018, she has traveled extensively in Africa, covering their mission to bring prosthetic limbs to victims of trauma and war.
In the spring of 2022, after an assignment with Limb Kind, she traveled with an interpreter to the Omo Valley in Southwest Ethiopia to photograph the extraordinary self decoration of the local tribes. From her tent by the Omo River she gradually eased her way into their daily routines and captured these simple, yet elegant, portraits.
There are a number of tribes inhabiting this area, including the Suri, Arbore, Hamer, and Nyangatom people. All of these tribes are under pressure from conflict and environmental changes, but also pressure to modernize from the Ethiopian government. These pressures have begun changing attitudes toward tribal ways of life like dress and wearing lip plates, and all of these tribes are struggling to maintain cultural identity as many young people strive to become more modern.