This exhibition explores the relationship of women with their bikes in the North of Uganda. Unlike the capital city, Kampala, where women rarely ride bikes despite the prevalence of boda-bodas for public and private transport, many women in the North use bikes for transport and carrying goods. This work celebrates the bike as the women’s travelling companion - ‘Wot ki lakwany lum iwangi’ (it's good to have a companion, especially when travelling).

This focus mirrors Henry’s own practice of the Wandering Studio, a mobile photo studio that Henry developed in Kampala, whose name reflects on his status as a traveller in East Africa. His work in the North builds on this wandering, translating the world through his photographer’s eye. 

In the first series, he captures the women in transit, practising a quick frame method that allows him to pose the women as they are. The focus is placed on them in such a way that the relationship between the woman and her bike is highlighted, while embedded in the environment. In these images, the women are centered and given the attention that they deserve, unlike ethnographic images, where people can be presented almost as extensions of the land to be conquered.

In the second series, Henry pushes this attention even further, by bringing his Wandering Studio practice to Gulu and building a backdrop there to take studio shots in the lineage of James Barnor and Malick Sidibe who used studio photography as a way of canonising everyday life on the continent. With this, he is able to push his practice even further as he experiments with more daring poses that enhance the relationship of the woman with her bike. Here the bike becomes almost an appendage of the woman, a show of her control of the tool and the way she wields its power to carry out her wishes.