Layers Of Truth

Hajarah Nalwadda has been making beautiful pictures since graduating in 2012 from Makerere University’s Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts. As such, even for someone with a gifted eye, the importance of her art education cannot be gainsaid: attention to detail, superior interpretation of color, wonderful composition. At Makerere University she briefly studied painting and advertising but later focused on photography, and she has followed no other profession ever since. She told TWR that she aims to take pictures in “an artistic way,” in a way that’s different from what a press photographer will typically produce.

TWR is pleased to publish the work of Nalwadda, the first photographer whose portfolio we are printing. Her work often approaches the artistic merit that many painters don’t achieve in their lifetimes. These 12 pieces are only a small fraction of her body of work over the years, but they represent the best of her field work as a photographer covering the news and documenting the lives of ordinary people. Her assignments in recent years have included trips to cover Ebola wards, to report on a deadly school attack by ADF rebels in Kasese, to track the activities of illegal charcoal burners in Gulu, and even to report on the making in Mbarara of the homebrew known as tonto. She’s also an avid photographer of landscapes, wildlife, and sports (especially rugby).

Nalwadda got her first taste of success when, fresh from art school, a stranger who had seen her landscapes online asked to meet her. The woman made a selection of 10 pictures that she wanted printed and framed, and later the woman paid her more than $1,000 for the collection. Nalwadda recalled being “extremely excited” by the sum, which she hadn’t expected, and she felt there and then that she could make a living as a photographer. Those pictures still hang in a restaurant in Gulu, and Nalwadda was delighted to see them again earlier this year when she went there. She told TWR that the experience had left her certain that photography is worthwhile “if you’re good at it.”

Many of her images are poignant, and they can haunt. They have layers of truth. The image of the man pressing tonto in a wooden vat takes on an otherworldly quality if one doesn’t know what he is doing, and the picture of a man shining torchlight at a naked bed – a scene from the aftermath of the 2023 attack by ADF rebels on a school in Kasese – is a powerful description of the landscape of violence. That photo, she said, was inspired in part by her fear of dead bodies, and she came upon the blood-stained room while prowling the school for an image that could encapsulate what she had seen (or not seen). She said the image illustrated the dark mood in Kasese after the attack that had left dozens of students dead.

The journalistic assignments can be rough and demanding, but she rises to the challenge at all times. Once, during an assignment to cover the manhood ritual known as Imbalu in Mbale, she had to brave the maddening, charged atmosphere of the event to get a photo of the boy who was the first to be initiated. That strange photo is published here, as is her painterly image of a solitary man in a canoe on a crater lake in Rubirizi.

Nalwadda, who was born in 1990, said that her early interest in art was expressed in her love of toy cameras. Her father indulged her, buying her many pieces, and years later her mother supported her decision to study art at university. Today her published work regularly appears in The New Vision newspaper as well as in many places online via The Associated Press, for which she has been assigned dozens of times. Her photo from the funeral in Bukwo of the Ugandan athlete Rebecca Cheptegei, who was killed by her partner in Kenya last year, was published on the front page of The New York Times. Nalwadda took home the first prize in the Uganda Press Photo Award competition last year, winning for a series of photos that included her documentation of the terrorist attack in Kasese. The prize was a new Fujifilm X-T50 camera, but what she really took home was recognition of her hard work as well as encouragement to continue doing what she does. ▪