Hanging Out With Partiers, Sex Workers, and Bouncers in Uganda’s Capital

Italian photographer Michele Sibiloni moved to Uganda’s capital city, Kampala, in 2010 with no contacts and no clear job prospects. But after reaching out to several news agencies, he was soon crisscrossing the continent to cover major events, including the independence of South Sudan and the M23 rebellion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Though the work was paying the bills and indulging his adventurous side, it wasn’t satisfying his creative impulses. He wanted to work on a series that communicated something about how he saw the world.

“I had a bit of a crisis because, yes, I’d come here to do this kind of work, but the interest I had in photography was more to tell stories with some personal experience,” Sibiloni said. 

After traveling the continent, his ideal subject turned out to be in his own backyard. For a while, he worked on a series of photographs of night guards around Kampala. Soon enough, he started expanding his reach more broadly to nightlife at large in the city and the diverse cast of drunks, expats, sex workers, bouncers, pimps, and partiers that populated it. His photos, taken between 2011 and 2014, are now collected in a book, Fuck It, which Edition Patrick Frey published in March.

“The thing that impressed me was the amount of nightlife, not just in bars and clubs but on the street. People are always going somewhere. The city doesn’t stop,” he said.

The photographs in Fuck It capture the energy and loneliness of Kampala at night in an unvarnished, flash-heavy style in line with the city’s grit and vitality. They appear without captions or context, making the exact nature of the situations and relationships depicted enigmatic. 

Sibiloni recognizes that the boozy, unbridled vision of Uganda presented in these photos may not reflect the impressions of many who’ve lived or visited there, but he also insists that they are not intended to represent a definitive or objective record. Quite simply, he said, they reflect one person’s experience. 

“I was trying to go where there was a bit of activity—could be bars or parties, downtown, in the streets. I had a motorbike, and I was moving around that way. I’d stop when something looked interesting. The only rule was to get out of my house as much as possible. When you move around, you meet people, so you make friends, and of course I was giving my number to everyone and people were calling me. It was a lot of fun basically,” he said.