Mukono

The brief — find a link with water — shaped the work in ways Woudt could not have anticipated. The community wells did not interest him photographically: a well is a well, and water coming out of a pipe felt too removed from water itself. So he and George drove to a community at the lake, where George knew the village chief and obtained access.

At the lake, children were playing in the shallows. Woudt heard them before he saw them. He walked toward the sound. The children noticed him. They began walking on their hands in the water, jumping, splashing. "Those are things I didn't indicate in advance. Those are the things that arise."

The still lifes came from a different kind of attention. Driving through the area, Woudt kept noticing jerrycans, the yellow plastic containers used daily by families to carry water. He began to see them as sculptural objects. He started arranging them, building a tower, testing how abstract they could become. "I began placing one on the ground and it became very abstract, more like art." The defining image from that session was not planned: the carefully stacked tower collapsed at the exact moment the shutter fired, introducing movement and imperfection that runs through much of Woudt's wider practice. "You can try to throw it over ten times and you won't get that. That's what makes it special."

The portraits came from the same openness. At a family home, he photographed a woman who was simply one of the family members present. No story constructed around her. He arrived, he looked, something caught his attention, and he made the image. The project's most iconic photograph came the same way. Walking through Mukono, Woudt encountered a young girl dressed impeccably: a dress, a string of pearls, a hat, her clothes moving in the wind. She stood with complete poise, as if she had stepped out of another era. "You would say she was styled and placed there, but she just walked around neatly with a kind of pearl necklace, a hat, and a beautiful dress. Her dress fluttered and her hands; everything was right. It was as if she came from another time." This image, which became known as The Queen of Mukono, is the symbol of the entire project.

The hands photograph came from a recognition that had been building across the trip. Woudt photographs hands often. At some point near the water, the two threads came together. "I wanted to photograph hands, but in combination with water. That way you immediately have the connection again." The image of hands washing in lake water became the main image used by the Marie-Stella-Maris Foundation.

The entire project was photographed in three days. "It's crazy that this was made in three days," Woudt has said. "Without the collaboration with Marie-Stella-Maris I would never have gotten these images."

Themes & Intent

Mukono is not a charity project. It does not document hardship, and it does not seek the image of suffering that has become the visual shorthand for work made in contexts of poverty or inequality. Woudt's choice, made before he arrived and held throughout, was the opposite: to seek beauty, dignity, and the small moments that persist regardless of circumstance.

"I never focus on the bad, difficult, or piteous sides of a society," he has said. "I'm not a documentary photographer who wants to show what kind of miserable situations people live in. I try to seek out the beauty of mankind. To find the small, tangible moments and to photograph people with self-confidence and pride. Even in countries like Uganda, and areas like Mukono where people have to walk miles for drinking water, there is something beautiful to find."

The photographs function, in his own words, almost as talismans: carriers of pride, hope, and quiet humanity. An innocent child dressed in a pearl necklace and a flowing dress. The beauty of a hand washing itself. A group of children playing in the shallows. Jerrycans arranged into abstract sculptural forms, then collapsing into movement. The images carry a timelessness that Woudt has described as central to his practice: no logos, no markers of era, nothing that places the image in a specific decade. They could have been made any time.

The visual language throughout is monochrome, minimal, rooted in the aesthetics of classical photography while entirely contemporary in execution. The choice of black and white is not aesthetic convenience. "Because we see color in daily life already, the added value of color in the photo is lost. I'm not looking for the truth, I want to tell my story." What remains after color is removed: form, texture, contrast, and the irreducible presence of each person in the frame.

The series spans three genres simultaneously: portraiture, landscape, and still life. Woudt does not treat these as distinct categories. A jerrycan can be as formally interesting as a face. The body of a child in water can be a landscape. What unites the images is not their subject matter but their quality of attention, unhurried, observant, present to what is there rather than what was planned.

The water theme, the only explicit brief, became not a constraint but a connective tissue. It appears directly in the portraits, as implied purpose in the jerrycan still lifes, as environment in the lake images, and as literal subject in the hands photograph. The project found the water theme on its own terms.

Working in the Field

Woudt's practice in Uganda was governed by the same principles as all his field work: arrive open, let encounters lead, trust the process. What was different in Mukono was the quality of access that came through local partnership. George made possible not just locations and permissions, but the layer of trust that any real portrait requires before it can be made.

"In one day I already had forty portraits, and then I knew: this is going to be fine." By the end of the third day, he had more material than from any previous project. The intensity left its mark. "It was such an explosion. It was so short and you do so much. You're busy all day and then it goes by in a rush." Some images, he has said, have become a kind of mystery even to himself, moments he can no longer fully reconstruct. That quality of the memory-image, something that resists full translation into explanation, is present in the photographs.