A dreamlike journey into the Democratic Republic of Congo

As a young boy grow­ing up bira­cial in Bel­gium dur­ing the late 1980s and 1990s, Léonard Pon­go felt a pro­found pull to a world he had yet to see: his father’s home­land, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of the Congo.

In 2011, Pon­go trav­eled to the Con­go for the very first time, amid the fre­net­ic chaos of a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Jour­nal­ists descend­ed on Kin­shasa to chron­i­cle the vio­lence unfold­ing before the vote but the pho­tog­ra­ph­er and visu­al artist chose to go anoth­er route, liv­ing among the peo­ple to devel­op a new visu­al lan­guage of photography. 

“This was a trip in a wide sense and cer­tain­ly altered my sense of self and con­nec­tion with the land and my fam­i­ly, who were res­olute to ques­tion my pres­ence and project as much as I was to cre­ate work that con­nect­ed to the Con­golese real­i­ties,” Pon­go says.

As he engaged in deep, some­times dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions, Pon­go began to con­nect with the real­i­ty of their lives. As time pro­gressed, he recog­nised his van­tage point as insider/​outsider was a gift to the cre­ation of the pho­tographs themselves. 

“I realised that my posi­tion gave me an incred­i­ble free­dom to also be myself and sort of play­ful­ly danc­ing around this space,” he says. ​“Embrac­ing this meant los­ing a lot of deci­sion mak­ing pow­er upon what hap­pens or when — let­ting go of my focus on doc­u­ment­ing and let­ting cir­cum­stances guide and influ­ence images.”

The process also guid­ed Pon­go to deep­en his intu­itive recep­tiv­i­ty to the moment, allow­ing the pho­tographs to be aligned with the emo­tion­al ener­gy unfold­ing both in the peo­ple and with­in him­self. Recog­nis­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of pho­tog­ra­phy as a medi­um of ​“truth,” he delved into the emo­tion­al, psy­cho­log­i­cal, phys­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al land­scape of dai­ly life inside the Congo.

Trav­el­ling through Kin­shasa, Kanan­ga, and Lubum­bashi from 2011­ – 2017, Pon­go spent time among close rel­a­tives, fam­i­ly and friends to cre­ate The Uncan­ny (GOST Books), a lay­ered and com­plex por­trait of the Con­go that appears as scenes from a dream: hyp­not­ic, frag­ment­ed, com­pelling and intense, yet detached from the req­ui­site con­text that offers a sense of familiarity.

Draw­ing upon photography’s abil­i­ty to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly doc­u­ment and dis­tort the sight­ed world, The Uncan­ny is at once sur­re­al and sub­lime, evok­ing an over­whelm­ing feel­ing of mag­nif­i­cence and awe that came as a result of Pongo’s expe­ri­ences of the land itself. 

Eschew­ing cap­tions and titles, Pon­go allows the images to speak for them­selves, tran­scend­ing the lim­its of the spo­ken word, whether French, Eng­lish or Lin­gala. With­out words, atten­dant hier­ar­chies of mean­ing van­ish and what remains are Pongo’s pho­tographs, equal parts poet­ry and doc­u­ments of an invis­i­ble pres­ence in the vis­i­ble world.

“It wan­ders among ani­mat­ed and inan­i­mate worlds and occa­sion­al­ly rus­tles,” French philoso­pher Nadia Yala Kisuki­di writes in the after­word. ​“This rus­tle is the uncan­ny. In Léonard Pongo’s pho­tographs, each of the images unveils its pos­si­bil­i­ty as a secret: in order to exist, one must some­times allow one­self to be van­quished. To let what is here take place while the essence of sub­jec­tiv­i­ty is noise­less­ly extinguished.”

Léonard Pongo’s The Uncan­ny is out now, pub­lished by GOST Books.

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