Kabalagala

A Peace Corps worker described Kampala’s Kabalagala bar district as Tijuana on LSD, which tells you something. He saw girls there in bars who were trying to seduce him and his girlfriend while scrolling through photos of their own kids on their phones, these two desires running parallel, and he couldn’t tell whether he was shocked or disgusted or both.

Michele Sibiloni is a photographer who’s shot for the Times and Vogue, but he went to East Africa and documented that particular nightlife. He called the district an untamed monster with sharp claws, populated by Amazonian warrior queens—bold, fearless, sharp-tongued. The broken people, the surviving people, the people breathing tragedies. He spent enough time there to let the place show what it actually is.

I’ve always been drawn to photography that doesn’t try to make sense of what it’s looking at. Sibiloni’s work doesn’t explain Kabalagala or excuse it or turn it into some redemption narrative. It just watches. Most nightlife photography is about the party, the glow, the spectacle, the reason you’d want to go there. This is the opposite. It’s about why people go to places like that—because they’re alive in them, because whatever mess happens there feels realer than anything else available. That’s not a story you can polish. It’s just what it is.

The thing that stays with me is how little judgment there is. The camera isn’t looking down. It’s not sympathetic either. It’s just witness.