Senayt Samuel
Senayt Samuel b.1969Jacob 2007
C-type print
Text (not illustrated)
Born 1969, Eritrea, lives and works in London
Senayt Samuel left Ethiopia as a teenager. While she was at school abroad, her family was deported, forcing her to reconsider her relationship to the notion of ‘home’. Photography became the medium for this negotiation, a way to investigate how the process of taking photographs itself reshapes memory and feeling and ultimately becomes a way to re-root oneself. Samuel settled in London in 2002.
Rooted 2007
Series of five C-type prints and texts
The photographs and texts that make up Rooted each tell a story relating to the process of making the images. Samuel returned to Addis Ababa for the first time in ten years in an attempt to regroup elements of her personal history. On this journey, sometimes following a trail, sometimes by chance encounter, places and people lost to her resurface.