City Remixing photo exhibition appreciates Kampala

Rumanzi  Canon's picture of the High Court

Rumanzi Canon’s photography at the ongoing City Remixing photo exhibition at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts Makerere University is quite a sight.
It’s mostly that place where new media and technology meets creativity; most of his pieces on display can easily pass for an editing manipulation, Photoshop or all those gimmicks that have been presented by a laptop in the right hands.
But Rumanzi’s creations are merely art and imagination, timing and a play with the exposure, he zooms out of what the historical photographs show, making places into planets, expanding framed views in panoramic images, shooting, as he calls them ‘Holes in the world’.
City Remixing presents photographs made of and in Kampala through time, as seen by 5 different photographers. It shows and wants to make us think about progress and development of Kampala, and the possibilities and limitations of photographic visualizations of urban environments at large.
In Rumanzi, it’s mostly experimental playing around with as many setting to discover new things, more presenting the same city we’ve grown up in a different point of view.
Dr. A.T. Schofield was a missionary and physician who worked under the Church Missionary Society in Uganda during the first half of the 20th century. An amateur photographer, he documented Kampala, events and places based on his social surroundings and interests.
Schofield took pictures of such iconic structures like Namirembe Cathedral, Rubaga Cathedral and Barclays Bank among other places.
According to a press release, part of Schofield’s photographic legacy has been donated to the Africana section of the main library of Makerere University and digitized by History in Progress (HIP) Uganda, also the organizers of the City Remixing exhibition.
Eng. M.W. Wambwa, an engineer with a soft spot for photography and journalism, he documented Kampala in the pre-independence days.
Elsadig Mohamed from Sudan, is a photographer and filmmaker, his photos in the exhibition have a shifted focus, at times blurred and hard to tell.
Luuk van den Berg a Dutch student at Minerva Academy in Groningen was invited to re-photograph some of the historical images.
The exhibition is one of the activities that lead to the launch of the fifth volume in the Ebifananyi book series, developed and designed by Andrea Stultiens.
Stultiens is a researcher, photographer and educator from the Netherlands, a co-founder of HIPUganda, she has been working in Uganda since 2007, trying to understand and relate to a culture far from the one she grew up in.