The Uncanny gathers work Léonard Pongo began in 2011, when he travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to photograph the country’s general election and its effects on society. What he found instead was the limit of his own position: an inability to decide which stories mattered, and a growing doubt that photographs could deliver the truth of a place he was also trying to understand as his own. The project, and this book, grew out of that reckoning rather than out of any resolved account of the country.

The photographs are black and white, and they move through landscapes, domestic interiors, streets, dance halls and churches. Long exposures and disorientating perspectives let figures drift and disappear at the edge of the frame; without a formal narrative, the sequence holds a feeling of instability that occasionally sharpens into threat. Portraits of strangers and friends register different kinds of consent, some sitters ignoring the camera, others asking for it. With colour removed, night and day are difficult to separate, and the religious, the spiritual and the secular run together. Pongo followed friends and family and let them direct what he should witness, so the book documents a personal experience of the country rather than the country itself.

GOST Books issued The Uncanny in 2023 as a 192-page clothbound hardback. For collectors drawn to photography that treats its own uncertainty as a subject, this is a considered first book by a Belgian-Congolese photographer working between documentary and something less settled. Its significance lies in that method: a body of work that shows what it cannot fully hold, and makes the showing part of the argument.

Please note that the book contains graphic imagery.