EVERY FRAME IS EVIDENCE.
EVERY SILENCE HAS A NAME.

The project ran for eleven months across three countries. In that time she produced over 4,000 photographs, filed six written dispatches, and developed relationships with communities in the field that allowed us access we could not have negotiated any other way. What she brings to a collaboration that most photographers do not is a quality of trust. The people she photographs trust her because she shows up more than once. She comes back. She asks how things have changed. She stays when the situation becomes difficult rather than filing the dramatic images and leaving before the complicated aftermath begins. For documentary work that is not just a professional asset. It is the entire difference between a film that matters and a film that looks like it matters.

We brought Mara onto a long-form documentary project covering displacement across the Horn of Africa in 2022. 

At that point almost no international photographers had material from inside the siege. She did. She had been there before the blackout began and she stayed. The photographs she produced during that period constituted the most complete visual record of civilian life under the siege available in the English-language press. We published a twelve-page spread. It was the most responded-to editorial package we ran that year. Readers wrote to us about those images for months. That kind of response does not happen because the photographs are technically accomplished. It happens because the person who took them was present in a way that produced something true rather than something representative. There is a profound difference and Mara understands it better than almost anyone working in this field today.

I first encountered Mara's work through a series of photographs she filed independently from Tigray in 2021 during the communications blackout.

They arrive, they document, they leave, and the communities they photographed never hear from them again. Mara is the exception to that pattern in a way that has genuinely affected how we think about partnerships with independent journalists. She came back to the community in Somalia we introduced her to three times over eighteen months. She brought printed copies of the photographs for the families involved. She asked what had changed and she documented the change rather than only the crisis. The archive she built from those visits is being used in our advocacy materials and in grant applications to funders who would not otherwise understand the scale or the duration of what these communities are living through. The work she produced has directly contributed to funding outcomes that are keeping programmes running.

Our organisation works directly with displaced communities across sub-Saharan Africa. We have worked with photographers and journalists in various capacities over the years and the experience is almost always the same. 

Not because they are the most technically perfect photographs my students will encounter but because they are among the most ethically coherent bodies of work produced by any independent photographer working today. Every image she takes exists within a clear and consistent framework of purpose. She photographs to create a record. She photographs because she believes the act of witnessing is a form of accountability. She photographs without the vanity that corrupts so much conflict photography, where the drama of the image serves the reputation of the photographer rather than the dignity of the subject. My students respond to her work differently than they respond to almost anything else I show them. They ask different questions. They start thinking about what it means to stay rather than what it means to arrive. That shift in thinking is what separates photographers who do important work from photographers who do impressive work.

I teach documentary photography at postgraduate level and I use Mara's dispatches as primary teaching material.