confiscated karamajong AK-47s – kaabong uganda

A lot of my documentary work, intentionally or not, tends to be pretty on-the-fly. It’s just the reality of NGO field work in Uganda – the best laid plans invariably get tossed out and you tend to do what’s available now. The shot of the recovered Karamajong weapons was not one of those cases. We knew we wanted photos of them, we knew it would be difficult to get the access, we planned and made phone calls, and it all came together.

Apparently, the Army is much more accessible than in years past. Our driver was shaking his head in surprise mentioning how we never would have been allowed on an Army base, let alone with cameras, let alone having them retrieve weapons from the cache to display for us.

For the book we chose a straight-on view of the AK-47s lined up against the mud wall. It fit well panoramic across the spread. I like this image for the focus of the beads on the stock.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 08:01 and is filed under Africa, Documentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.