For Admas Habteslasie’s most recent photographic series Limbo, the London-based artist travelled through the East African country of Eritrea — where war and destruction have scarred and shaped the landscape — and composed images of bizarre beauty, imbued with tranquillity and a sublime touch. Eritrea’s situation is a typical postcolonial narrative. Having warred with Ethiopia for thirty years before gaining independence in 1991, the country entered into another war in 1998 following a disagreement about the exact demarcation of the borders. Such fierce conflicts decimated Eritrea’s population and infrastructure and left its people waiting for life to improve. Since 2001, Eritrean society has been hovering in a limbo, stuck between war and peace.

Limbo pieces together an understanding of the havoc wrought around those whose lives hang in the balance, one that draws on the country’s anachronistic obsession with promoting an image of self-sufficiency. Operating outside Western ideas of progress and technological rationalization inherited from the Enlightenment, modern-day Eritrea is characterized by a romantic longing for a bright future. The past, however, still casts a long shadow on the present. Development and deterioration exist side by side in the landscape; life for these people fails to move on and time itself appears frozen. As Habteslasie writes: Transitory states become permanent; empty villas, destroyed old buildings and unfinished new buildings dot the landscape, monuments to the suspension of history. The collision between Eritrea’s proud historical narrative and the bleak ennui of the present has produced an obsessive focus on the future. Reconstruction and infrastructure development are energetically driven forward whilst the economy remains essentially shut off from the outside world.

Many of Habteslasies’s photographs bear the hallmarks of a photojournalist or documentary photographer who has turned to art photography as means of expression, similar to the ways in which Simon Norfolk or Paul Seawright aestheticize images of war. Rather than working on the front line, he has focused on the aftermath of war and produced a set of images that enter a different register. They are quieter, more contemplative and ultimately more resolved than the quotidian documentation of war photographers. Because Habteslasie chose not to depict people in dramatic states, or to use the typical shock tactics which dogs much photojournalism, he offers not so much the truth but the possibility of the truth in understanding the real, natural situations of people. Thankfully, he avoids rehashing clichéd images of the horrors of war. He sees his approach as a more honest mediation on his subject matter, something which in turn poses an interesting question about the paradoxical nature of photojournalism: are photographers documenting the situation or merely their relationship to the situation?

The images bring to mind the descriptive prose of Marcel Proust that invincibly creeps over us with a kind of epic power. Similarly, the work has a relationship with the tradition of painting. His lyrical and delicately coloured photographs recall the sensitivity to light and atmosphere as well as the pastel colours of Claude Le Lorrain and J.M.W. Turner, reflecting appropriate human sentiments in weather conditions, times of day and poetic light effects.

The role of the photographic image is also being addressed here. The overtly personal way he pictures contemporary Eritrea turns the idea of objectivity, typical of documentary photography, on its head. By juxtaposing a subjective approach and an objective style he questions the realistic impulses of photojournalism altogether.

Ultimately, out of this wonderful imagery emerges a profound examination of identity, and a revaluation of our relationship to history, one that purposefully makes clear that the unilateral objectivity that characterizes many visual representations of African political and social issues all too often presents the continent through the prism of perpetual tragedy.