Photographers look at Africa from fresh angle

"Ethiopia gives you the full spectrum of humanity. The absolute misery and the absolute joy, and you can see a juxtaposition of all these elements in just a day," Muluneh says.

While there are foreign reporters and photographers who take a broader look at Africa, Muluneh takes aim at "false representations" of the continent by those who focus too heavily on its troubles.

"Africa is being treated unfairly," she says, before arguing that a similar racism can be seen in news images of black people elsewhere in the world.

"When you look at images coming out of the States, when it deals with black people, it's always drug dealers, pimps, killers and so forth. When you look at Africa, again, it's a negative image of the starving Africans, the war-torn."

Muluneh founded the Addis Foto Fest to bring black American and African photographers together and to encourage Ethiopian photographers to reclaim their own stories.

"We do not need foreign photographers to tell us our story," she says, leafing through some pictures she took at Lalibela, Ethiopia's emblematic tourist site where churches are carved out of rock.

Her black-and-white photographs capture the details of everyday life, of interiors, faces and fleeting gestures.

In what is likely Muluneh's best-known series, Painted Faces, she shows young African women, faces painted in blue, white or bright red with the models presented as artistic subjects rather than being reduced to their "Africanness".

"A lot of my work is about removing time and space. It's looking at the universality. Some don't realize it's Ethiopia ... I want to think of the continent in a different way," she says.