Photojournalist · Kenya
Mohamed Amin
Mohamed "Mo" Amin (1943–1996) was a Kenyan photojournalist and cameraman, founder of the Camerapix agency in Nairobi and one of the most prolific reporters of Africa's news in the 1960s–1990s. His 1984 footage of the famine in Ethiopia, broadcast by the BBC, moved millions and led to Band Aid and Live Aid. He lost an arm in an explosion in Addis Ababa in 1991 and died in the hijacking of an Ethiopian Airlines flight in 1996.
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Camerapix
Mohamed Amin was born in Nairobi in 1943 to a family of South Asian origin and was taking pictures for newspapers while still at school. In 1963, aged about twenty, he founded his own agency, Camerapix, from a small shop in Dar es Salaam, and moved it to Nairobi three years later. From there he covered East Africa and much of the continent for international news organisations: revolutions, coups, wars and elections, as well as wildlife and travel, which Camerapix also published in books. His photographs are in titles such as Pilgrimage to Mecca (1978) and Journey Through Pakistan, and in volumes on East African wildlife and the Uganda Railway. At his death he was chief executive of the London-based Camerapix Publishers International.
Ethiopia, 1984
In October 1984 Amin, working for the news agency Visnews, joined the BBC correspondents Michael Buerk and Mike Wooldridge in the famine-stricken north of Ethiopia. Using contacts he had built over years of filming in the country, he got the team into a makeshift camp at Korem, in an area closed to journalists; the shoot began on 19 October. Amin's film of a vast camp of starving people, broadcast with Buerk's report, was seen around the world. It was news footage, shot over two days, not a documentary. It prompted the musician Bob Geldof to organise Band Aid, whose record "Do They Know It's Christmas?" was released that December, and the Live Aid concerts of July 1985 — one of the largest humanitarian fundraising efforts there had ever been.
Addis Ababa, 1991
In 1991, as Ethiopia's civil war ended, Amin was badly injured by the explosion of an ammunition dump in Addis Ababa. He lost his left arm. He was fitted with a prosthetic arm and went back to work, still filming.
Flight 961
On 23 November 1996 Amin was on board Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767 flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, when three hijackers seized it. The aircraft ran out of fuel and came down in the Indian Ocean off Grande Comore; 125 of the 175 people on board were killed, Amin among them. Survivors said he had tried to reason with the hijackers.
Legacy
Amin's archive of photographs and film is one of the largest records of post-independence East Africa: more than 8,000 hours of raw video and about three million still photographs, made between 1953 and 1996. The Mohamed Amin Foundation, founded in 1998 shortly after his death and run by his son Salim Amin, looks after it and runs a media training centre in Nairobi. Salim Amin also chairs Camerapix and co-founded the pan-African news channel Africa24 Media, which he chairs, so the family's work in African news continues into the next generation.
How to look at Amin's work, and where to see it
Mo Amin spent four decades photographing and filming across the continent, and part of the archive has been put online with Google Arts & Culture, in the project Mo Amin: Eye of Africa, and it is the best way in. Look for what is different from his famine film: the same cameraman recorded elections, wildlife, railways, markets and ceremonies for decades, so the footage that made the world pity Korem sits inside a record that is mostly of something else. The Foundation's own site and Google Arts & Culture are the places to start. A younger photographer from Nairobi, Dan Eldon, was killed covering Somalia for Reuters in 1993. For the wider story, see African photography and East Africa, and our list of African photographers.
