From Uganda, this month we join Dutch artist and photographer, Andrea Stultiens. Her work probes the question – How can we tell meaningful stories that are relevant to different audiences for different reasons? A consideration that is multi-fold, whether it be to address how archive photography should be managed, the challenges and limitations of photography and methods to bridge that gap to create meaningful narrative. Sojourns in Uganda over the last ten years, have influenced her reflections which includes how images make and impact our understanding of ‘the other’ or even to the common representation of Africa through archives. As we publish this very story, she is currently tasking her photography workshop participants in Kampala to make similar considerations and reflections in their work, which we will feature in the comings days. We had the pleasure of interviewing her on these very topics.
Your work tackles three sensitive areas in the field of found imagery, the construction of archives, the manner by which they are preserved and shared, as well as how they are then consumed as a marketable commodity. Can you give us an overview as to your thoughts on these areas and how you attempt to address them through your work as both an artist and photographer as well as teacher?
Andrea Stultiens: I have always been interested in (hi)story. It was my favourite course in high school, and has never left me. When embarking on photography I soon found out that my photographs were only one take on the subject I was dealing with, and had its limitations. So I started to use existing images from private and public collections to complement the photographs I made myself. They added a historical perspective as well as very literally other views. This adding of vernacular material to my work led to obvious additional questions about the archives themselves. In my work I am trying to deal with those questions by contextualizing old (and new) photographs in different ways, thus showing their unfixed nature, giving them a role in a narrative that is related to someone and to the world and therefore documentary. This way my work deals with the narrative of photography while telling meaningful stories. My aim is to make it (the work, the photographs in it) relevant for different people for different reasons.
What issues have you encountered or been confronted with in your engagement on the topic of ‘representation of Africa’ through photographic archives.
AS: How archives are kept, and used, opened up, or not, tells us something about how people deal with a part of their history. This is relevant everywhere in the world but particularly in Africa. My experience limits itself to Uganda. The country has a colonial history that defines most of the representation of its history, and has struggled since independence. The information available about that history is mostly focused on either the ethnology of part of the country or the political history. Next to that there are the tourist books that create an image that is romantic, and a construction that people want to see. There are no archives that I know of as in Europe, or at least, I have not yet seen them. There are however private as well as public collections that can be very meaningful in adding different views on history from different and not often heard of views/voices. I am tapping into those sources, connecting them to the present. This is not always easy. Specially the institutional archives are reluctant to let me in, and help them to open up their material. That is understandable, they are finally in charge of it, and do not want another white person to start messing with it, and appropriating it. I realize that I am an outsider, and therefore will never completely understand what I am dealing with. I deal with this by making my position towards the story told and material handled explicit and part of the story.
You have completed numerous projects in Uganda, working together with photographers and subjects alike on projects such as ‘Things That Matter’ (2007), ‘Pose’ (2009), ‘The Kaddu Wassa Archive’ (2010). Your work expresses a very thoughtful and human representation of some aspect of daily life. Can you tell us what was the impetus for you to develop these specific stories, and how Uganda happened to be the setting for these stories?
AS: The driving force for my work is curiosity and not understanding things. I came to Uganda the first time in 2001, and then another time in 2005 as a tourist, visiting a close friend from my study years in the Netherlands who was, and is living here. Traveling in Uganda confronted me with prejudices I thought I did not have and with prejudices of the people I encountered towards me and my white skin. I decided to see if I could do a project that could help me get some insight into the images that we base our ideas about each other on. That is how Things That Matter, in which I asked primary school children in Uganda and the Netherlands to show each other what is important in their lives started. The photographs made by the children were contextualized by two school trips. We visited a museum representing the history of respectively Uganda and the Netherlands. Those trips and the way history is told there was photographed by me. During this project I walked into a photo studio in a provincial town in south west Uganda to have my portrait taken as a souvenir. The studio had photographic wallpaper on all its walls, and one of the depictions was a famous Dutch garden. I became friends with the owner of the studio and started photographing it. That was the start of Pose. Other studio’s, and some of their customers were added later. During one of my stays in Uganda I was trying to get into the archive of Makerere University. A local photographer I knew was helping me to get past some of the bureaucracy. When I tried to explain to him why I wanted to see what was in the archive (and compare it to what I knew of similar collections in the Netherlands), he told me that his grandfather also had some old photographs that might be of interest to me. This grandfather was Kaddu Wasswa, and the collaboration with him and his grandson has led to the most layered of the projects I have done in Uganda so far.
In 2010 you initiated a workshop series for photographers in Kampala, Uganda. What was the basic premise and framework for this workshop series?
AS: It was actually initiated by Bayimba Cultural Foundation in Kampala.They asked me to execute it. They are doing workshops in many cultural fields. The results are usually presented during one of their festivals. I don’t think there really was a basic premise. This was the first of its kind in Uganda, and it was really a matter of testing each other, finding out what photographers knew and wanted to know. It turned out that they knew little and wanted to know everything. We basically started by looking at some of the photography books available in and about Uganda, and I asked them to photograph something they were missing in those books. They worked on that for about a week and then we started editing and making it presentable in print.
How did that opportunity arise and what were the key challenges and achievements?
AS: The opportunity just came from Bayimba’s question. We looked for, and managed to find some funds. That was maybe the easiest challenge. Then there were the differences in the photographers. Some had decent SLR camera’s, others had to borrow a small digital compact from their boss, that didn’t give any opportunity for them to control the image they were making. Some had to work other jobs alongside the workshop. The Ugandan reality creates constant challenges for people, and they were also part of the workshop I guess. The achievements were that the participants got to know each other, that some of them got to know and control their camera’s a bit better, that they got to see another approach to photography than what they were used to, and finally a pretty nice exhibition. Each photographer could either make one A1 print, or 4 x A3 prints. And we made a 20 page book for each one of them. Just self-produced on an inktjet printer that I had brought. Seeing their photographs as a product made the participants grow in inches.
This month, August 2011 you will be running the 2nd workshop series. Can you tell us what advancements the program has made and what exciting topics you will be focusing on with your students?
AS: Last year two of the participants continued to work together after the workshop. They built on the work and experience of one of them. Arthur Kisitu (who is also Kaddu Wasswa’s grandson) lived in a slum area, Katanga, and they started to portrait people living and working their. They shared their results with me and I was impressed with them. A frustration I had with last years workshop was that it was hard to motivate the photographers to go back to places, to do some really in-depth research into their subject. This was due to some of the challenges mentioned before, and to the unusualness of this approach. Nevertheless I think it is an important experience for a photographer, to work with their subject, and not about them. So, Arthur and I have talked to individuals and small groups in Katanga and asked them if they would be willing to share their stories with the workshop participants. Each of the photographers will be teamed up with one of them and asked to spend time with them and listen to what they want to say. Their job is not to come up with a story, but to find a visual strategy to tell it.
What do you hope your workshop participant will contemplate and achieve in this year’s program?
AS: I hope they experience the benefits of opening up as a photographer, of not knowing what you are going to encounter and shoot before you go. We create a very luxurious situation for them. To work in one place for more than a week, not run around from here to there. I hope this will make them look closely at what they see, think about the different ways to possibly deal with them and pick one that is within their reach and comfortable for their subject. Next to this I also hope again to give them more insight into the technical possibilities and limitations of photography. Making them use their camera’s and not have their camera’s use them, as is often the case.
You use photographic narrative to better understand the relationship between Europe and Africa, will this bear any influence in the workshop series?
AS: It inevitably does, since I am involved and cannot exclude this interest that I have. But working with a group of participants that is mainly Ugandan (we have 8 Uganda participants, one Norwegian who lives in Uganda, and Irene Sinou, who is French and worked with Arthur Kisitu after the workshop last year) will be a great learning opportunity for me, showing me again other views on Uganda.
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Stay tuned for this month’s ‘In Focus’ series which will showcase both the work of Andrea Stultiens as well as featuring stories from this year’s photography workshop.
About
Andrea Stultiens does things with photographs. She makes them, collects them, looks at them, thinks and writes about them, and sometimes she makes the results of this visible to the rest of the world. She is amazed by how we are influenced by our environment. By how we take control of that environment, how we mould a fictional variant of ‘real life’ and remember it with the help of photography.
All images courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.
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