219 - Leonard Pongo
Leonard Pongo is a Belgian-Congolese photographer and visual artist. His long-term project The Uncanny, shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has earned him several international awards and world-wide recognition and was published as a book by GOST earlier this year (2023) as a result of Leonard receiving the ICP GOST First Photo Book Award in 2020.
Leonard’s work has been published worldwide and featured in numerous exhibitions including the recent IncarNations at the Bozar Center for Fine Arts and the The 3rd Beijing Photo Biennial at CAFA Art Museum. He was chosen as one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016, is a recipient of the Visura Grant 2017, the Getty Reportage Grant 2018 and was shortlisted for the Leica Oskar Barnack award in 2022.
Leonard’s latest project, Primordial Earth, was shown at the Lubumbashi Biennial and at the Rencontres de Bamako where it was awarded the “Prix de l’OIF”. It was exhibited at the Brussels Centre for Fine Arts for Leonard’s first institutional solo show in Belgium in 2021, at the Oostende Museum of Modern Art and is currently feartured as part of a group show entitled A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern until January 14th 2024.
Leonard divides his time between pursuing long term projects in Congo DR, teaching and assignment work and is also a member of The Photographic Collective. His work is part of institutional and private collections.
In episode 219 Leornard discusses, among other things:
- Early creativity encouraged by his architect father
- His first experience with photography
- His early desire to go to the DRC
- His first trip in 2011 against the backdrop of an election
- Sensory overwhelm
- Playing with mood and ambiguity
- Winning the Unseen-Gost Books Publishing Award
- Editing down from 70,000 images
- His Primordial Earth project
- His short film The Necessary Evil
“I think behind all the constructions and expectations, right or wrong, that I might have had, there was behind it at the core a very intense need for experience... the only way I could create relations to the land and the environment itself - not the people because that was easy, that was natural - but to the rest, the context, was through experiencing it. It felt to me that was the only way I could ever have anything to say about it.”