Reclaiming the Lens: Congolese Photography Beyond Colonial Narratives

On 19 August 2025, to mark International Photography Day, Kinshasa celebrated the centenary of this art form in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), highlighting its vitality. From the artistic images of Sammy Baloji and Léonard Pongo to Pamela Tulizo’s staged works, via Arlette Bashizi’s reportage, Congolese photography continues to reinvent itself by challenging codes that many consider "Eurocentric".

Inextricably linked to the nation’s history, Congolese photography has had to decolonise itself in order to realise its potential. And, in a country lacking resources and political support, it is championed by artists who nurture it at home and help it flourish abroad.

With the series The Uncanny, produced between 2011 and 2018, the photographer Léonard Pongo, who lives between Belgium and the DRC, his country of origin, has experimented with a language free from Europeanised formulas and norms: “By following the people I know, I focused on those moments that foreign media usually overlook. The photographs arise from a perception, a feeling, rather than an attempt to construct a single narrative, a storytelling in the Western sense of the term.”

Tired of documentary photography and questioning her artistic practice, Pamela Tulizo developed staged photography: “I wanted to transform my shots into a kind of cinematic score with a stage, set design and actors to tell stories in a different way,” she explains.

The boundaries of the imagination were pushed even further in Gosette Lubondo’s series Imaginary trip (2016). “Disturbed by abandoned places bearing the marks of time,” the 33-year-old photographer took an abandoned train at Kinshasa station to portray “imaginary travellers whose expressions and clothing evoke the atmosphere that once pervaded that place”, as stated in the description by the Parisian gallery Angalia, where Lubondo exhibits regularly.

Contemporary Congolese photographers have broken free from established conventions. Trends in documentary and journalistic photography in the DRC were introduced by foreigners who had preconceived images in mind. “Congolese photographers have a very personal approach, with conventions that are uniquely their own. Whether it’s advertising, fashion or events, photography here has an identity all of its own,” says Pongo.

Tulizo emphasises: “The horizon line, the framing, and the composition of the image are very different from those in Europe.” She adds wryly, recalling an incident that occurred when she was working as a wedding photographer in Goma, North Kivu: “A bride and groom insisted very strongly that they absolutely did not want any photographs taken by white people.”

Although the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa has had a photography department since 2020, access to this course of study remains limited due to a lack of specialist organisations and universities. Consequently, the most talented photographers seek scholarships to work abroad, particularly in South Africa. “I went to the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg because there were no schools or facilities in Goma where I could train,” says Tulizo. It was the same for Arlette Bashizi, an award-winning photojournalist, who is also from that city. “I taught myself; I learnt through social media,” she says.

To make up for this lack of resources, photographers are organising themselves by setting up inclusive initiatives. For almost a year now, the Efothô association in Goma has been striving to promote Congolese photography through free lessons. “We want to connect experienced professionals with talented young people to pass on our knowledge, foster exchanges and tell the region’s story in our own voice, so we can speak with dignity about what is happening,” explains one of the founders, Moses Sawasawa, who is not yet thirty.

Marie-Jeanne Munyerenkana took part in the workshops and the Survivre exhibition, launched by Efothô at the end of 2025. “In Goma, there aren’t many opportunities to train as a photographer. With Efothô, I learnt the basics of the trade and how to showcase my work, particularly through exhibitions,” she explains. Supported by the Belgian and Swiss embassies in the DRC, the Survivre project (meaning ‘how to survive the war in the east of the country’) was presented at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa.

Pamela Tulizo attempted to do something similar by setting up the Tulizo elle space in Goma in 2021, a visual arts training centre exclusively for women. “Women can learn in safety, without judgement, and discover ways to break free from the traditional framework of the community,” she explains. Over the past four years, the centre has hosted conferences, seminars and programmes on women’s art, and specifically on photography, “but activities have been scaled back because security conditions have deteriorated and state funding is lacking,” she says.

Congolese photographers are more often given a platform at these events, but “if we don’t exhibit in Europe or the United States, it’s difficult to gain international recognition,” Tulizo emphasises.

“We need spaces created by us and for us,” continues the photographer, who ended 2025 with the exhibition Baadayee (After, in Swahili) at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. It is a series on asylum seekers in France, shedding light on their lives before exile and the one they imagine for the future.

But even though there are spaces in which to share their experiences, the lack of institutions dedicated to them deprives Congolese photography of the opportunity to preserve and pass on its history.

There are few studies on the origins of photography in Africa, carried out by dedicated researchers and archivists, often aided by the invaluable Revue noire, a journal that promoted contemporary African art worldwide between 1990 and 2000.

From the 1920s onwards, photography -which until then had been the preserve of the Belgian colonial administration- began to captivate young Congolese people, observes Sandrine Colard in her 2016 essay Photography in the colonial Congo, 1885–1960, published in 2016. This shift has also been examined by Baudouin Bikoko, who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, in his book Photo comme écriture (2024): “I was particularly keen to highlight the difference between photography in the Congo and Congolese photography,” he explains.

In the early 20th century, in what was then the Belgian Congo, photography was used exclusively by the colonial government, and ‘official’ images were intended for the metropolis. Those photographs conveyed a deeply stereotypical, and often dehumanising, view of the Congolese population, reducing people to exotic or functional figures. They paid no attention “to our culture or our identity”, adds Bikoko, because “what was happening in the so-called ‘native’ city didn’t really interest the whites”.

In the exhibition Recaptioning Congo, presented at the FoMu photography museum in Antwerp in 2022, Colard traced the long and turbulent history of photography in colonial Congo. “We wanted to compare the perspectives of European photographers with those of African photographers, long marginalised, within a Belgian colonial regime that controlled and manipulated images,” explains Salomé Omanga, the exhibition’s cultural programming manager.

Through his research, Bikoko identified Samuel Lema as the first Congolese photographer, whose first photograph dates back to 1925, taken during a trip for a Swedish Protestant mission in Central Congo. Other pioneers also emerged in this region, such as Antoine Freitas (1904–1966), of Angolan origin. Itinerant photographers travelled the length and breadth of the provinces with their ‘box cameras’, arousing deep mistrust: their practice was associated with witchcraft and they earned the nickname muena magimbu, ‘magical sorcerers’ in the Tshiluba language.

Initially, photographic studios had been opened and frequented almost exclusively by Europeans. Then, in the capital, towards the mid-20th century, Congolese-run photographic studios began to flourish, in parallel with the rise of the independence movement. Fuelled by a tentative ‘opening up’ promoted by the colonial administration and by the cultural and social administrative reforms preceding independence, photography aroused growing interest.

Photographic studios, which were often set up outdoors, saw the emergence of the first family photographs, captured mainly by the famous Jean Depara, who later opened the legendary Jean Whisky Depara studio.

As the signs of photographic studios sprang up along the grand boulevards of Kinshasa, a genre of photography practised within them began to develop. The most common form was the portrait. Antoine Freitas opened his Antoine Photo, and Samuel Lema made a name for himself with Studio Less. Little by little, the capital’s profound urban changes began to influence photographic practice, and Congolese artists sought to capture a city in a state of constant transformation and full of vibrancy.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, nightlife in the DRC reached its peak, with Kinshasa’s bars resounding to the rhythm of Congolese rumba to celebrate the newly won independence. Jean Depara’s camera captured that festive atmosphere and his ‘beautiful nights’, as he was a regular at the venues of the time, such as the Oui Fifi or the Afro-Negro. Depara achieved international fame by becoming the official photographer of the musician Franco.

Famous female photographers also emerged during that period, recalls Bikoko, although “in Nigeria and Ghana they had already been around since the 1920s”. Jacqueline Sudila Mpate, a close associate of Marshal and later dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, was the first Congolese woman to be allowed to photograph him.

Whilst photographs from the colonial period have been collected, preserved and archived, those from the early 20th-century Congo are still being studied by younger generations of photographers. The idea today is to “add new captions to colonial photographs, letting those directly involved speak out to deconstruct colonial propaganda”, explains Salomé Omanga. Deconstructing history, if one cannot rewrite it. 

Source: Afrique XXI

edited: Gemma D. F. and Alfredo L. M.