Seeing Sudan: visual archives in a time of war

Abstract

This visual essay focuses on archival photographs from Sudan that form part of the Sudan Family Archives, a collection assembled and digitized by photographer Ala Kheir, in association with the Photography Legacy Project. The piece reflects on these images in the light of the war in Sudan that began on 15 April 2023.

Keywords:

• Sudan
• war
• photography
• archives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ala Kheir was born in Nyala, South Darfur, Sudan in 1985. He co-founded the Sudanese Photographers Group in 2009. See https://alakheir.com The Photography Legacy Project was founded by David Goldblatt and Paul Weinberg in 2018 and aims to digitize African photographic archives and make them widely accessible. See https://www.plparchive.com.

2 A small number of the photographs Habiballa took of political leaders and visiting dignitaries are held in the collection of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Approximately 60 photographs (many of which portray the already-militarised nature of the newly independent state), form part of the archive assembled by collector, Claude Iverne.

3 Gadalla Gubara (also spelled Jadalla Jubara) was born in Omdurman, Sudan in 1920 and is best known as Sudan’s first and most significant filmmaker. See: http://studiogadarchive.com

4 Aljazeera, “‘They Burned the Memory of the Homeland’. Anger in Sudan Over the Burning of the Library of Al-Ahlia University”, May 20, 2023. https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2023-05-20-%22they-burned-the-memory-of-the-homeland%22–anger-in-sudan-over-the-burning-of-the-library-of-al-ahlia-university.B1xTq5Urn.html.

5 El Zahraa Jadallah and Tom Rhodes, “The War Raging over Sudan’s Present – and its Past,” The Continent 128 (June 2023): 11–13. https://www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/287178_0eeb3720763a488c8c3b735b9b78f002.pdf?index=true. See also Ruba El Melik, and Reem Abbas. (Un)Doing Resistance: Authoritarianism and Attacks on the Arts in Sudan’s 30 Years of Islamist Rule (Sudan: Andariya, 2022).

6 Nesrine Malik, “‘All that We had is Gone: My Lament for War-torn Khartoum,” The Guardian, July 18, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/18/all-that-we-had-is-gone-my-lament-for-war-torn-khartoum.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kylie Thomas

Kylie Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in History of Art and at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, and a Senior Researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where she co-directs the NIOD ImageLab, a project on war and visual culture. She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after apartheid (Wits University Press & Bucknell University Press, 2014) and coeditor of Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge, 2016) and Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges (Routledge, 2020). She is the visual essays editor at Safundi.