Contribution short abstract:

This talk examines the possibilities for 're-sounding' the Idi Amin photographic archive: a collection of around 85,000 negatives, produced by Amin's official photographers, that I helped to uncover, with Malachi Kabaale and Winston Agaba, at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala in 2015.

Contribution long abstract:

In recent years, the field of visual anthropology has paid increasing attention to the ways in which photographs may be ‘re-sounded’, which is to say, brought into relation with voice, narrative, and other elements of sonic experience. This presentation, which is very much a work in progress, examines the possibilities, and implications, of such a move for our understanding of the Idi Amin archive: a collection of around 85,000 photographic negatives, produced by Amin's official photographers, that I helped to uncover, with Malachi Kabaale and Winston Agaba, at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala in 2015. Since 2018, the University of Western Australia, in partnership with the University of Michigan, have been leading a project to digitise this archive, to conduct research on it, and to bring it to public attention including through exhibitions. In this presentation, I want to introduce the next phase of my own research on the archive, which is exploring what affordances the photographic archive has to be re-sounded, in various ways. I want to also explore how these, and other kinds of multimodal ethnographic interventions, may further the goal of doing justice for the up to 300,000 Ugandans who lost their lives at the hands of the Amin regime.