the modernity of witchcraft

In 2013, I travelled to Kampala, Uganda with my 6×7 medium format and 4×5 cameras to make portraits of practising witch doctors. Locating them was unexpectedly straightforward, their presence felt woven into the fabric of the city, cutting across class and circumstance.

Witch doctors, also known as traditional healers and herbalists, serve a wide spectrum of needs. I came to understand that many people turn to them for ailments believed to stem from spirits, curses or unseen forces as well as for conditions such as infertility, AIDS, mental illness and even homosexuality. The boundaries between the physical and the spiritual felt fluid, often indistinguishable.

By chance the four practitioners I photographed all belonged to the Basoga tribe, originating from Eastern Uganda. In Kampala their work appeared not only culturally embedded but economically significant, at times more present in daily life than Western medicine. Some had positioned their shrines in central slums while living on the city’s edges, navigating geography in pursuit of visibility, livelihood, and opportunity.