Redressing power imbalances with Sarah Waiswa

Encouraging African women to further their photography careers has become important work for Canon Ambassador Sarah Waiswa. The documentary and portrait photographer was born in Uganda, grew up in Kenya, and then spent ten years in the USA, studying and working in America's corporate world, before returning in 2010 to Kenya, where she is now based.

With this unusually international perspective, she has a passion for exploring contemporary identity on the African continent. She acknowledges that part of this is "like self-discovery – using photography to tell other people's stories but then also to look inwards to understand your own story." However, she adds, "I studied sociology and psychology, and I'm deeply interested in people and their stories. I think my background informs the topics that I'm interested in working on, but I'm much more interested in collaboration – working with the people who I'm photographing and making sure that I'm not projecting myself on them, but that we are trying to create something together."

With collaboration and redressing power issues at the heart of her photographic work, Sarah co-founded the African Women in Photography network, which celebrates the work of women and non-binary photographers from Africa, championing the female perspectives that are underrepresented in the profession.

"I think photography has always been dominated by white males, and we obviously want to see many more stories from women, but of course from African women," Sarah explains. "Africa is a highly photographed continent, but you'll find that most of the photographers, especially in the past, were white and male.

"We want the opportunity to tell our own stories – saying that we are just as capable, that our stories are just as important. We do have a perspective and that needs to also be recognised."

The network offers opportunities to learn through mentorship, provides links to funding options and, crucially, creates a space for much-needed conversation and support. "What the community is able to do is provide us with a platform to have discussions about challenges we face, to share information, to put resources together and try to make navigating the field a little bit easier than it would be if we didn't have the space," says Sarah.

Redressing historical and contemporary power imbalances is a prevalent theme in Sarah's own work. Her Stranger in a Familiar Land project shone a light on the life of Florence Kisombe, a model with albinism, and others with the condition in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as society's response to it.

Another of Sarah's notable photographic series is Lips Touched with Blood, which places Sarah's contemporary portraits of African people alongside archive portraits, creating a display that reframes and questions narratives around colonialism, power and identity. Sarah's techniques include blacking-out subjects in the images, to take the power away from the photographer and show a reclamation of identity.

The project is a collaboration with the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection at Bristol Archives, which holds around half a million photographs from the countries of the former British Empire dating back to between 1860 and the 1970s, most of them taken by British travellers.

"As much as the image was important," Sarah adds, "when you look at those colonial images, what was also interesting for me was the captioning behind the images, which gave the context of the conditions at the time when those photographs were taken."

The photographer, Sarah continues, was often portrayed as an explorer, "and he's kind of on an expedition. The question is, did the people in the images have agency? Did they want to be photographed? Even in the descriptions, they really are just being described as though they are sights seen on a safari – 'Oh, here's a native,' or whatever. It's not really like this is a person, this is So-and-So, and this person has a family. It's just the explorer saying 'Look at all these great things I've seen.' It's not really about what's being seen, it's about the person doing the seeing.

When it comes to changing the narrative, Sarah believes the image is just as powerful as the written word. "It's easier for me to connect with an image than it is for me to connect with text. Photos have a lot of immediate impact," she says. "Of course, pictures don't give the full story of what's happening, but they can touch you and make you think.

"The thing is, you can look at an image and I can look at an image and we both get something different. And that's going to be influenced by our backgrounds and so many other things. I think that is also the power of an image or the power of art, that it's subject to interpretation and starts a discussion."

Looking to the future, Sarah hopes the African Women in Photography community will continue to grow. "We're building and learning from each other. I'm hoping that young and emerging photographers will have an opportunity to use the community as a resource, that they will be able to further their careers, and that they will be able to share their talents with the world and continue to contribute to different issues.

"Our voices haven't been heard for a long time," Sarah concludes. "But this is the world's chance to see what life is like through an African woman's lens. It's a perspective that needs to be heard and seen."