Picturing Idi Amin: Photographs from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation

22 October–14 November, Tues-Sat, 12pm-5pm | Schenberg Room, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery

Idi Amin was the subject of hundreds of thousands of photographs over the course of his eight years as president of Uganda (1971-79). It had been thought that these photographs created by the official photographers from the Ministry of Information were lost to posterity. However, in 2015, Richard Vokes, working with Winston Agaba and Malachai Kabaale at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC) in Kampala, uncovered a filing cabinet full of 70,000 lost photographic negatives from the Amin years.

In 2018, the UBC, in partnership with University of Western Australia and the University of Michigan, launched a project to digitise this important collection, and to bring it into public view both in Uganda, and throughout its Diasporas. Picturing Idi Amin brings together a selection of images and audio-visual materials from this work to try to make sense of what happened during the Amin years, and to forge shared understandings for the future.

Picturing Idi Amin is curated by Richard Vokes, Associate Professor, Anthropology and International Development, University of Western Australia. It is part of a larger project, The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Photographs from the Uganda Corporation, co-led by Vokes, Derek R. Peterson (University of Michigan), Edgar C. Taylor (Makerere University) and Nelson Abiti (Uganda Museum).

Please note: none of the images featured in this exhibition show violence directly. However, they do include pictures of individuals who were condemned by Amin’s courts, and pictures of one of the sites in which killings took place. The text panels also contain written descriptions of the personal and social upheavals of the period.

Image: H.E. opens Jjajja Marina 24 July 1975, UBC 4858-017. (c) Uganda Broadcasting Corporation.