Martina Bacigalupo is a photojournalist. Since 2009, her work has brought her to Eastern and Central Africa, from Burundi to Somalia to Uganda. Her report on the consequences of the massacres committed by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army over 25 years earned her the Canon Female Photojournalist Award. It was while she was developing the first photographs from this painful investigation that she discovered, in a local photographer’s studio, a collection of 10×15 portraits from which the faces had been carefully cut out.
The series of portraits is reminiscent of Malick Sidibé’s work in Mali, or Oumar Ly’s in Senegal. Although the faces are missing, the postures—timid, stiff, well-behaved, anxious—suggests that their expressions would be more serious. The perforated portraits evoke the bullet holes left by the years of civil war which has caused the rural population to flee.
The large number of refugees alarmed NGOs and a new urban rhythm emerged with bureaus for microfinancing, infrastructure projects and professional armies. All of these institutions required a photo ID, a costly waste for this region impoverished by constant conflicts.
Local photographers Raymond Okot and his son Obal Denis began simply cutting the faces out of the larger portraits in an effort to save money and time. (Their passport photo machine printed four copies of each picture, whereas the customers only needed one.) Martina Bacigalupo began recording the accounts of the studio’s customers while collecting these odd portraits. The shop became a local theatre, an agora where people talked openly of their experiences of the war, their politics and their plans. Even more so than the neighborhood barber shop, the studio brought together the population of northern Uganda in all its political and social diversity. They are all determined to build a future for themselves, either through tradition or through accepting modernity, as symbolized by a father who has taken his son to be photographed every year on the same day, October 9, the day Uganda gained independence from Britain in 1962.
This projects traces 25 years of Ugandan history and 25 years of Ugandan photography. It’s not surprising that this attracted the interest of Artur Walther, who recently published a three-volume history of African photography.
« Gulu Real Art Studio »
Martina Bacigalupo
The Walther Collection / Steidl
192 pages
38 euros
Gulu Real Art Studio
The Walther Collection Project Space
Jusqu’au 8 février 2014
508-526 West 26th Street, Suite 718
NY 10001 New York
USA
http://www.steidl.de/flycms/en/Books/Gulu-Real-Art-Studio/0829405056.html
http://www.walthercollection.com
http://www.agencevu.com/photographers/index_photographer.php?id=255
