Eva-Lotta Jansson

Second Place, Single Photo Professional

Eva-Lotta is a freelance photojournalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, who works on assignment across Africa for various international media and aid organizations. A Swedish national, she studied journalism in the United States and has studied photojournalism and worked for media outlets in London, South Africa and Washington, DC.

Eva-Lotta’s first photography project in South Africa was an exhibition documenting women mine workers. It opened at the Bensusan Museum of Photography, at Museum Africa in Johannesburg and traveled to mining towns in the country. She said the experience “hooked” her on “the continent, the people and their stories,” and moved to South Africa permanently in 2006. Her projects often focus on minority groups and social justice issues, and she has spent much of her career in Africa telling the stories of people affected by HIV and AIDS, especially children. Recently, she began training a group of students in photojournalism and documentary practice at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg.

The Borena,along with her honourable mention photo, was taken on assignment for Oxfam America. Eva-Lotta traveled to Ethiopia to document people severely affected by climate change, and to show how some farmers and pastoralists have found ways of improving their subsistence odds against the hostile effects of climate change.

In The Borena, Dhokatu Galma empties the dirt she has carried from the bed of the dry pond seen in the lower part of the photo. The pond lies just below Gutu Dobi, a village near Ethiopia’s southern border to Kenya. Villagers here are deepening the pond so that it will hold more water when the rains come again. The project was triggered by the Drought Early Warning Surveillance System, an Oxfam initiative that is helping communities track the effects of prolonged dry periods and take steps to prevent them from destroying their livelihoods. Women play a key role in collecting the surveillance data, an effort that has empowered them and given them a voice in their communities.