Sosina Mengistu, an Ethiopian photographer, has turned her camera on herself to reflect the anxiety and frustration of young people during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her project, So I See Me, began in 2020 and continues to this day, using personal experience as a lens for broader generational uncertainty.
A project born from lockdown
The title So I See Me reflects the central idea of using the camera to look at herself, while also echoing her name, Sosina. When the pandemic began, Mengistu was in her final year of an engineering degree at the University of Gondar in Ethiopia. She had been excited to graduate and start the next chapter of her life, but everything suddenly came to a halt.
Expecting travel restrictions to be short-lived, she stayed with her uncle in Bahir Dar in the north rather than returning to her hometown of Asosa, more than 450 miles to the west. She ended up stuck there for eight months.
Turning the camera inward
As the months passed, Mengistu wondered whether she would ever graduate, when the pandemic would end, and what would happen to her future. She had developed a passion for photography at university, starting with her phone and shooting everyday life around Gondar. With travel restricted and little to photograph, she turned the camera towards herself, using self-portraits to process feelings of anxiety and frustration about the future.
Around the seventh month of the pandemic, she took a photograph leaning against a dry branch. It was the rainy season, and most trees were full of leaves, so she was drawn to the dry, bare branches against the sky. She was not consciously thinking of the tree as symbolic at the time, but the sunset that evening made the scene feel right, and she liked how she could place herself within it.
A feeling of suspension
Looking back, Mengistu can see why the image felt right for that moment. The branches reflected how she felt: uncertain and stuck while everything around her seemed to be moving. The photograph captured the feeling of being suspended between hope for the future and being almost ready to give up.
When lockdown eased, she returned to university, graduated, and moved to the capital, Addis Ababa, but finding work was difficult. She spent another six months without a job, continuing to take self-portraits while figuring out what direction to take. Eventually, she decided to leave engineering behind and pursue photography full time.
She took thousands of photographs during that period, selecting and publishing about 153 self-portraits. Most reflected what she was feeling at the time, though some were inspired by books, music, nature, or simply an idea she wanted to explore.
A shared experience
Although the photographs come from her own experiences, the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next is something many young people are living through as they try to find their place in the world and build a future. Mengistu was not planning a long-term project when she started during lockdown; she was simply using photography, with whatever tools she had, to make sense of where she was. Somehow, she is still doing the same thing today.
