On ancestral self-fashioning: photography in the time of AIDS

Abstract

This article looks at a series of photographic practices that emerged in Southwestern Uganda in the 1990s, in response to an emergent AIDS epidemic. In particular, it looks at the albums AIDS patients made in the final months of their lives. The article argues that these albums are an outcome both of a modernist, realist register and of an alternative set of locally meaningful dispositions toward the photograph. It is by keeping both of these frames in view that we are able to understand the extraordinary ongoing power these albums continue to have, long after the deaths of their producers, the AIDS patients themselves.