A young photojournalist who shines a light on humanitarian crises and winner of the World Press Photo award, Adriane Ohanesian has documented the civil war in South Sudan, the armed conflicts in Somalia, Darfur and Burundi. Her striking images inform the world of the fragile lives of refugees from South Sudan and the situation in the Nuba Mountains in Kordofan.

In March 2016, one of Adriane’s images documenting the darkest side of humanity landed in the gobal limelight. The photo, titled “The Forgotten Mountains of Sudan,” took second prize in the “contemporary issues” category of the annual World Press Photo contest. It shows Adam, a Sudanese seven-year-old boy, severely burned after a bomb was dropped near his home in Burgu, Central Darfur. “The picture was taken on our way deep into the mountains. We stopped in this tiny town, which had been bombed a week ago. A small boy was injured in the bombing. Adam's burned shirt was actually still on the floor,” Adriane recalls. 

The powerful image has drawn the global public’s attention to the situation in Sudan, but Adriane has mixed feelings about being in the spotlight: “I almost do not know what to feel. I am proud to have been able to get there and to bring back some evidence of what’s happening, but on the other hand, it’s hard because these are real people with real lives. Some of them may not even be alive anymore, or maybe they have been displaced, and that’s terrible.”

From the island of Manhattan to the mountains of Sudan

For Adriane, it all started as a game. Her mother had an old camera that caught her attention when she was in high school. But it was not until college that the game became serious and Adriane began telling stories through her lens. While working on her thesis in anthropology, which consisted of a photo essay, she traveled to Indonesia to study the role women play in local religious life – that’s when she realized she could use her camera as way into people’s lives. The photo essay led her to study at the International Center of Photography in New York City. After graduating in 2010, she visited Sudan for the first time, opening a new narrative.  

Adriane has Armenian heritage: her paternal great-grandparents were survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Fleeing massacres in the Ottoman Empire, her great-grandmother arrived in Constantinople, while her great-grandfather escaped to Argentina where he worked in railroad construction, later moving to the United States. 

Adriane is a third-generation American: born in Saratoga Springs in New York she currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya. As a photographer, she never planned to cover humanitarian emergencies, much less to photograph places that have been bombed. “It just happened,” she says. 

In 2010 she documented the voting process in a referendum held to determine whether South Sudan would join the north or become independent. “I was not necessarily interested in conflicts; I was there because this place had been my home for two years and it was plunging into violence. I knew the people, I understood a bit about the culture, and suddenly the armed conflict began and there was nothing I could do,” says Adriane. 

In order to fund her frequent travels Adriane worked as a nanny in Manhattan, going from sleeping in tents and living without electricity in Sudan to caring for children in New York. 

In 2012, she became a correspondent for the Reuters news agency covering Africa. Her work has appeared in the world’s most prestigious media outlets, such as Time magazine, Al Jazeera, The Wall Street Journal and National Geographic.

Hope in the mountains

South Sudan is presently faced with a severe humanitarian crisis: in 2011, the region’s mostly Christian population celebrated the referendum establishing independence from the predominantly Muslim north. Within less than six months, the dinka and nuer ethnic groups clashed in an armed power struggle. The UN estimates that the conflict has displaced more than 2.4 million people so far.

Even though a peace treaty was signed in 2015, the cease-fire has been violated countless times and violence persists. “South Sudan is an extremely difficult place. It has a harsh climate and if you want electricity – you need a generator, if you want water – it needs to be pumped. It is like stepping back in time; people live as they did thousands of years ago in the mountains, out in the open. But a lot of these people have been displaced from their homes; they fled the armed conflict or their villages were destroyed; most of them are women and children. A few people who made it high up into the mountains live in caves, hiding from the bombings. Many of them have been victims of sexual violence; women and girls have been raped by government forces and their militias. There are no resources, but some civilians have managed to reach UN bases or refugee camps,” says Adriane.

Trekking through the the Nuba Mountains Adriane met and photographed Dr. Tom Catena, a doctor at the Mother of Mercy Hospital and one of the inaugural Aurora Prize finalists. He is the only physician permanently stationed near the region’s border with Sudan and serves more than 500,000 people. “He is literally saving lives. The work he is doing cannot be compared to anything else. For that community, he really is a lifeline. It was an honor to meet him; I just think it is incredible that he wakes up every day and does this type of work,” says Adriane. Despite several bombings by the Sudanese government, Dr. Catena resides on the hospital grounds and remains on call at all times. 

“A lot of this happens in a moment”

Adriane left the comfort of her home in the United States and puts her life at risk by entering government territory, without permission, to reach rebel-held ground, where she goes in search of stories, testimonials and evidence. “It is a kind of an island in the middle of the government sea. Once we are inside the rebel territory, it is a bit more secure,” she says. “I landed in this place for a journalistic assignment and I have the privilege of doing that. My hope is that my images will spread information and help, somehow. Hopefully, they can be useful in changing policies or ending the support for governments that are helping the regime in Sudan,” Adriane says.

Her dedication to illuminating harsh realities has won several prizes. In May 2016 she received the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award, which recognizes the courage of female photojournalists who risk their lives to document conflicts. 

She has also been recognized by National Geographic, Getty Images and LensCulture, among others. 

Adriane believes that chance is just small element of photography and it is not enough to just press a button to capture a moment: “You never know what you are going to get, you never know when someone is going to do a gesture. So in that way, it is kind of me reacting to a situation with my camera. I would say most of it happens in a moment. It is not easy to get a certain image or to get access to something in particular. It takes time and requires patience. Hopefully, if you put in the time and are patient, you will be rewarded. But not always.” 

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

“I think it is worth a thousand different words. I mean, there are different ways to interpret words; we have different languages, different vocabulary, but I think a picture is worth a thousand words because everyone has their own words to describe what they see, and that is the part I like about it. We can both look at the same photograph and you can come up with different words than I, or different meaning. Everyone interprets an image in a different way.” 

Cover photo: Women and children sit outside a cave where they find shelter from bombings by Sudanese government forces on rebel-controlled territory in Central Darfur, Sudan. Adriane Ohanesian, 2015.