Reinout van den Bergh’s Eboundja takes its name from a fishing village in southern Cameroon, home to some thirty families. Van den Bergh began the project in 2011, recording a community whose future had been uncertain since 2009, when its coastal surroundings became the site of a deep-sea harbour project connected to Chinese participation and Cameroon’s iron ore.

The photographs attend to the consequences of development at the scale of lived experience. Rather than treating the harbour solely as infrastructure or political abstraction, van den Bergh concentrates on the people required to inhabit its shadow. Eboundja is marked by vulnerability: the villagers face governmental corruption and development conceived on a scale far beyond their own power. Yet the work does not reduce them to evidence of loss. Decline and resignation coexist with intimacy, beauty, pride and resistance.

This balance gives the project its particular gravity. Van den Bergh’s sustained involvement allows the village to appear neither as an untouched enclave nor as a simple casualty of modernization. It is a small community negotiating forces that are international in reach but immediate in effect. The photographs hold together environmental change, economic ambition and personal attachment without allowing one register to eclipse the others.

Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2020, the hardcover book extends the project across 200 pages. For a serious photobook collection, its importance lies not in a claim to rarity but in the focused form it gives to a long-term documentary encounter. Eboundja preserves a close view of one community at a moment when coastal land, natural resources and local autonomy are being radically renegotiated. Its restraint—and its refusal to separate political pressure from ordinary dignity—makes it a considered contribution to contemporary documentary photography.