Seconded By: Jean Pierre Rieu,
This selection of photographs is part of an ongoing visual journey through the Democratic Republic of Congo — a land of extraordinary natural wealth and devastating contradictions. As a young Congolese photographer, I grew up surrounded by both beauty and violence. My camera became a way to ask questions, to slow down the noise, and to witness what often goes unseen.
At the heart of this work is a tension between humanity and the environment — how people live with, rely on, and sometimes destroy the landscapes that sustain them. These images trace the fragile threads between natural resources, exploitation, displacement, and survival. From remote mining towns to disappearing forests, from rivers turned toxic to communities resisting in silence, each frame tells a story of a land both wounded and alive.
The DRC has some of the world’s richest natural resources and biodiversity. This is the country’s luck and curse, it is etched into the faces of young miners, into the scars on the earth, and into the social fabric of places where conflict and extraction have become intertwined.
What interests me is not spectacle but slow violence—the kind that unfolds over time, out of sight—the way a tree disappears, the way a river dries up, the way a village shifts because the ground underneath has been sold. These are environmental stories, but also human ones.
These photographs are not just documents; they are questions. What does it mean to belong to a place that is constantly being taken? What does hope look like in a scarred landscape? Can we learn to see both the beauty and the harm — and hold them together without looking away?
On a deforested strip in Bugamanda, a man stands his machete cutting wood in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park on September 3, 2021.
Henri Zambi, father of a family, rises from the surface after a few minutes of diving into the water to look for freshwater oysters in the Congo River a few kilometers from the village of Nteva on the Atlantic coast of Muanda, Kongo-Central province, Democratic Republic of Congo, April 26, 2023.
At the foot of Nyiragongo volcano in Virunga National Park, displaced people carry charcoal from the forest to the market in Kibati to sell in the city of Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, January 13, 2023. After the resurgence of the M23 rebellion north of Goma city, more than 140,000 people camped in Nyiragongo territory, struggling to find enough food for their families, displaced people turned to charcoal production; in less than two months more than 200 hectares of trees were cut down.
Bienvenu Ondome works in a forest around Moku in search of gold in the Haut-Uele province of the Democratic Republic of Congo on January 16, 2024.
Patric living in Yangambi clears the road for a car after a tree and falls in the middle, 100 km from the city of Kisangani, in the province of Tshopo, northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo on September 2, 2022.
In the morning, one of his sons, the village chief of Oruaba, cleans the plot of land to welcome people arriving with their bread in the village of Oruaba in the province of Haut-uele in the Democratic Republic of Congo on 15 July 2024. – The village of Oruaba is one of the villages in the Watsa territory that has been affected by gold mining. Rivers, forests, and drinking water sources have been affected and destroyed by the arrival of semi-industrial gold mining.
M23 soldiers secure soldiers of the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo boarding vehicles to shackle them in an M23 camp outside the city of Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on January 30, 2025. After the AFC/M23 captured Goma, some Congolese soldiers surrendered to the AFC/M23, while others and the authorities were evacuated to the nearby town of Bukavu.
ICRC staff and Red Cross volunteers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo mobilize to make a collective burial of those who died during the week of clashes in Goma at the ITIG cemetery in Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on February 04, 2025. According to the United Nations, at least 3,000 people died after the clashes in the week before February 04, 2025.
Artisanal miners at work on the Shabara mine site in Lualaba province, Democratic Republic of Congo, August 17, 2023. – The Shabara mining site is home to more than 20,000 artisanal miners working to extract copper and cobalt.
Members of the African Apostolic Church of Congo participate in baptizing new members in the Lualaba River on August 12,2023.
The faithful use this watercourse for initiation and purification rituals, believing it to be one of the few remaining clean rivers in the midst of local cobalt mining.