In Kinshasa, a sapeur’s dress is a form of address: it announces membership in a brotherhood that carries its own social and moral codes. Photographer Per-Anders Pettersson followed that world between 2012 and 2019, and his third book assembles the result across 51 colour photographs. The society named in the title is not a formal institution so much as a set of obligations and pleasures — a way of life, as the project frames it, and at times a means of survival. Rival groups compete in the streets, at gatherings and on radio and television, turning visibility itself into a prize.

Pettersson, a Swedish photographer born in 1967 and long based in Cape Town, came to the subject after decades of international news work and an earlier focus on African stories, including an earlier book on democracy in South Africa. That background shapes the approach here. The portraits and street scenes take their subjects seriously as practitioners of an embodied art, recognizing the glamour they produce without reducing the movement to mere imitation of Western fashion standards.

The book holds 51 colour photographs on 112 pages, published in hardback by Dewi Lewis Publishing at 226 by 170 millimetres. Its subtitle is plainly stated; the humour and defiance of the phenomenon lie in the pictures. The sequence moves between individual display and collective ritual, between the shine of the clothing and the neighbourhoods the sapeurs return to — places described, without sentimentality, as humble, bleak, even destitute.

For collectors, the appeal is the combination of subject and commitment: a sustained seven-year engagement with a specific Kinshasa subculture, made by a photographer with a substantial documentary career. Each copy is signed and numbered. That is the material fact to weigh.

The movement should not be narrowly defined, the project insists, as consumerist obsession. SAPE is a distinct subculture within the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the photographs let its internal logic stand.