Dennis Kimbugwe | Sunday, November 28th, 2021
The true role of photography in society is something that none of us will ever understand. I believe this to be true because of the ever-changing nature of the medium, our sensibilities as well as the “collective” society itself. Nevertheless, this knowledge has not stopped many photographers in the past and present to try and find the answer to this important question, and it is in this same spirit that I make this exploration today. The nature of the genre at the forefront of this exercise and the fact that this is my first formal attempt to identify the role of photography in society influenced my approach to this enquiry greatly.
For a lot of people, photography in its many forms is a language of violence both in terms of the stories it is used to tell about them and how these stories are told. This became all the more true for me on Tuesday, November 16th, 2021 when two explosions believed to be carried out by suicide bombers went off in Kampala, Uganda (my hometown) and as one can imagine, there was a lot of graphic visual content that was shared about the explosions and the victims. Even though my only connection to the events was that I am a Ugandan photographer from Kampala, the insensitive nature of these graphic visuals felt like a secondary assault, I can only imagine what the victims’ families must have felt like.
After a lot of introspection about my own role and participation as an image maker, sharer and consumer, I was reminded of how conditioned and desensitized we have become and continue to be regarding other people’s suffering and the way photography is used to show it for whatever reason or purpose. While my photography practice works differently at this point in time, I wondered how I could maintain my relationship with photography if it too, is a form of violence, a language which affords some people dignity and other people indignity.
In the film “War photographer,” while speaking about the photographs he made about the genocide in Rwanda, James Nachtwey said “…they were killed with very primitive weapons…”3 I was interested in why his statement seemed to allude to him elevating the other deaths he had covered in other parts of the world to some kind of higher standard, as though death by“non-primitive” weapons or whatever the opposite of primitive weapons is is fundamentally different or better. This led me to question why his documentation of these events differed and whether the “primitive” weapons that were used during the genocide in Rwanda made him feel like he could photograph those bodies in the way that he did. Even more importantly for me, I wondered how much influence the cause of death has over which rights a body is allowed to retain after death and whether the absence of law enforcement is considered as consent for a dead body or its remains to be photographed and distributed in any way.
Admittedly, this exercise left me with more questions than answers, but it inspired me to free myself and continue exploring the possibility of making work that transcends the confines of my understanding and relationship with photography. The resulting artworks question the possibility of talking about important issues without exploiting one’s likeness. I believe that we must all ask ourselves if we would truly be incapable of caring or helping without a visual presentation of suffering or pain.
REFERENCES:
1. Figure 1: Artwork by Dennis Kimbugwe, Death by a Primitive Weapon.
2. Figure 2: Artwork by Dennis Kimbugwe, The Body is in Pain, Do Something.
3. Quote by James Nachtwey from the film “War Photographer” by Christian Frei, 00:31:43 – 00:31:45.
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