IT’S SPRING in the year of 2021, the sun is sliding higher into the sky, redbuds are popping, and vaccinated humans are re-emerging into the world. All of this has me in a visual mood. So today’s post features the eye of Hanna Wondmagegn, a talented young photographer and graduating senior at UNC.
Ms. Wondmagegn picked up a camera to try out photography only halfway through college, as she worked to figure out how best to capture her storytelling instincts. She and the camera went together quite splendidly, it turned out.
Wondmagegn is from Charlotte, having grown up in the Rosehaven neighborhood in a global community of immigrants. Her parents are from Ethiopia. In this story for Coulture Magazine, she explained that the ways she saw communities like hers portrayed in the media helped inspire her to go into storytelling and photography.
“Ultimately, why I love journalism and got into journalism goes back to that community I grew up in, Rosehaven,” Wondmagegn said. “We were just this small little bubble of people from all over the world, and there was so much strength in the stories they would share through food or music or just being together.”
When immigrant communities made the news, Wondmagegn didn’t recognize the narrative she saw. “I grew up with these people, I am one of these people, and this is not our story,” she remembers thinking. Today, she is driven by the desire to tell inclusive and representative stores.
Her below photograph of the Bell Tower at UNC is just one sample I share here because it resonated as symbolic of the ground Stone Walls covers. I’ve seen a thousand images of the Bell Tower — photos from every angle and in every light, paintings, drawings, etc. — and never expected to find one interesting again. Yet in addition to being a fresh take (shot from the top of a parking deck, she says), it at once conjured thoughts not just of UNC’s campus but also of all its under-told stories, held by ancestors looking down on the “Southern Part of Heaven.”
A few more photographs, selected by her, appear below. Many more can be found at her website and her online print shop, where you can purchase photo prints, aluminum prints, canvas prints, and framed canvas prints. She also happens to be an excellent follow on Twitter.
Recently, Wondmagegn’s photojournalism was published by The Assembly, a digital magazine about North Carolina, with this piece about Rocky Mount, where downtown train tracks separate majority-white Nash County and majority-Black Edgecombe County.
Do browse her website and check out in higher resolution than Stone Walls can provide her various projects, such as “Masculinity Defined” and “21 Under 21.” Her portraiture work is stunning, and she is available for hire for portraits, headshots, and graduation photos. (She’s currently taking bookings for April.) Visit her online store and treat yourself to her work for your home or workplace, or as a gift. I will be doing so as soon as I can narrow down my choices.
MS. WONDMAGEGN also recommends several other local photographers and visual artists of color:
Nash Consing: nashconsing.com
Patsy Montesinos: linkedin.com/in/patsy-montesinos/
Landon Bost: landonbost.com
Angelica Edwards: angelicaedwards.com
Chris Ocana: linkedin.com/in/christian-ocana/
Daniela Rodriguez: linkedin.com/in/danielarrodriguez/
Hope Davison: hopedavison.com
Savion Washington: swashphoto.com
Solomon Keys: solomonck.com
ONE GOOD THING: On Saturday, I attended Sonny Kelly’s performance of his show “HAUNTED: An American Tale” at The ArtsCenter of Carrboro. There were only about a dozen (masked) people in the audience, and my name found its way onto the list because portions of Kelly’s show were about Manly McCauley.
The show was livestreamed, and you can still watch it on YouTube. A description of HAUNTED can be found here. (Technical difficulties caused the livestream’s audio to disappear for a few minutes, but stick with it.)
The amount of historical ground Kelly covered was an extensive educational experience, sort of a dramatic interpretation of a college lecture. I found the care he put into imagining Manly McCauley’s circumstances in 1898 Chapel Hill especially touching after having spent so much time myself thinking about Mr. McCauley’s life.
“ Ms. Wondmagegn picked up a camera to try out photography only halfway through college”
!!!!! Wow.