Photo by Finbarr O’Reilly 

In a country that produces music like Baloji’s and and protests like those pictured above by Finbarr O’Reilly (more here), it is unsurprising the issues of representation are contentious.

Yesterday, Congolese voters went to polls amid violence and confusion. For more on the elections, read Congo Siasa or Texas in Africa. The upshot of the election is as of yet unclear, but while Congo is in the news (again) I wanted to take this opportunity to write about Richard Mosse’s continued series of infrared images of DRC.

I first wrote about Mosse’s work last year with reluctant praise. I liked the images, but feared they were a bit gimmicky. However, Mosse’s newest set puts these concerns to rest — he’s committed to exploring a complicated region through a medium fraught with its own limitations.

In an interview on the photoblog Conscientious, Mosse speaks to these issues directly:

Susan Sontag pointed out that photojournalists have long avoided the ethic/aesthetic dilemma by ‘flying low artistically speaking’, using grainy black and white film to appear sober and objective while portraying human suffering. I feel that it’s equally valid to explore the camera’s full aesthetic potential. Naturalism is no greater claim to veracity than other strategies.

I was searching for a new form, or generic hybrid, that would go a step further. While making the work, I was acutely aware of the fact that infrared light is invisible, so I was literally photographing blind. The whole process seemed preposterous. I felt like the protagonist in Gogol’s Dead Souls, quantifying an absence using a meticulous scientific method while engaged in a picaresque trajectory through an impossible land…

At the end of the day, I feel that journalism’s premise is often not simply to inform, but also to affirm our world view. I take issue not with its informing role, but with this affirmation. I believe that it’s imperative to challenge our thinking, particularly in more volatile and loaded landscapes whose narratives are frequently calcified by mass media interests. My work is not intended as a criticism of journalism (which is tremendously important). Rather, it operates within the open field of contemporary art, where the emphasis is not on the answers, but on the questions – not on the facts, but on what they add up to.

While votes are added up, and news briefs and photo reportages accumulate on the internet, it’s good to have Mosse’s work as an additional viewpoint. Neither his work, nor the work of the journalists covering the elections, is as complete without the other.

 For more on representations of Congo, see also:

Pete Muller: beyond hordes of angry men with guns and cows
Of photographs and soldiers in DRC, redux

Yesterday, Ciara Leeming over at Duckrabbit linked to an audio slideshow in the Guardian about male rape that accompanies a long written feature ont he same topic. It focuses on Congolese refugees in Uganda who were raped – some in DRC and others in Uganda. The audio includes many gruesome details, a practice all too common in journalism about rape, but I do think that photographer and writer Will Storr avoids sensationalizing the stories these men have shared with him. I felt uncomfortable watching the piece — which is certainly the point. Storr doesn’t leave us with any hopeful narratives or mutterings about how strong the Congolese are. Instead, there are just these men and their families and their tenuous futures.

Yet, the written piece begins,

Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour.

While female rape in Congo is widely covered, it is sensationalism to call rape against men a secret. The New York Times reported on this in 2009, it’s mentioned in the Mapping report, and elsewhere.

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post up about American involvement in Somalia:

Counterintuitively, the best thing the US might do to prevent Somalia from becoming an operating base for Al Qaeda is to disengage, limit involvement to targeted strikes on international terrorist leaders and to providing humanitarian aid. That’s the case governance expert Bronwyn Bruton makes in this interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. She notes that a divided, clan-ruled Somalia was an environment Al Qaeda previously found impossible to operate in – the level of inhospitality of the clan system appeared to “inoculate” Somalia from foreign engagement. She suggests that allowing the TFG to fall and Al Shabab to rise will lead towards Al Shabab fracturing as a coalition, and eventually a return to clan politics and conflict, which is ultimately the only stable basis for a future functional Somali state.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi makes a similar case in an article in the American Thinker titled “What To Do About Somalia“. He urges a containment strategy – ensure that Al Shabab doesn’t act outside of Somalia, and cut off external supports. He also suggests the US and the international community recognize Somaliland, the comparatively stable north of the country, as an independent nation, creating another potential ally in stabilizing southern Somalia.

(Side note – while looking for Al-Tamimi’s article, I searched for “what to do about Somalia”. Google returned a wonderful result from Trip Advisor, titled “Things to Do in Mogadishu“. I love that Trip Advisor wants to find me a cheap flight to Mogadishu and to help me find a cheap Somali passport.)

What I find most interesting about Bruton’s arguments is her argument that the US is incorrectly framing the situation in Somalia as a conflict between religious ideologies. She argues that the TFG and Al Shabab are both ad-hoc, opportunistic groups looking for power, not advocating for a particular religious ideology. Because TFG is seeking funding from western governments, it argues that it’s a bulwark against terrorism. Al Shabab looks for support from Al Qaeda in the hopes of support from extremists in the Middle East. But the ideology is secondary to the search for power. (Some groups in Somalia have expressed concerns that the TFG includes a large number of Wahabbists, which seems incompatible with a pro-US orientation… and supports Bruton’s case that ideology is trumped by opportunity.)

If we take the conflict in Somalia out of the “extremist Islam versus the world” frame that the US often falls into, Bruton argues, we might be able to see that increased outside intervention will likely worsen the conflict. Perhaps then would make the decision to disengage. This doesn’t mean ignoring Somalia – it means watching borders closely, and being willing to strike against foreign fighters should they take shelter under Al Shabab. But it means giving up a failed strategy of nation building on the cheap and by proxy.

Katrina Manson has an interesting piece on the Retuers blog about the wealth of Lumumbashi, DRC.

LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) – Membership at the governor’s new gym costs $300 a month, the gastronomic menu at the new $350-a-night hotel is going down a treat and traffic guided by lemon yellow-uniformed police runs smoothly under sunny skies.

While Congo is more often associated with rebel killings, labelled by the United Nations as the world’s rape capital, filled with red tape and river journeys into the depths of jungled gloom, Congo’s copperbelt, in the southern Katanga province, seems a world apart.

Buoyed by mining income for more than a century, Katanga’s provincial capital Lubumbashi shows little sign that nearly 80 percent of Congo’s 67 million people live on less than $2 a day.

“We are proud that we are the richest province, that we have jobs and that life is much easier than in (the capital) Kinshasa,” said Kabwita Ipanga, a street vendor who sells chess boards made of polished malachite, a mottled green stone from which the copper that has made the province rich can be derived.

Katanga has rebounded since the global financial crisis saw copper prices plunge and mining operations suspended, putting hundreds of thousands out of work. Congo estimates it will double output by 2012 to 850,000 tonnes of copper and 90,000 tonnes of cobalt.

Today expatriate miners can count on swimming pools, game-watching and bowling to amuse themselves, and London-listed Lonrho said it opened its smart hotel to serve those drawn by the $12 billion being invested in Katanga’s resources.

Bombastic Element (which is one of my favorite blogs for links to interesting articles, issues, photos, music, and more) posts about a project at Luz Gallery by photographer Devin Tepleski that looks at a community in Bui, Ghana, whose residents are threatened with relocation by a new hydro dam.

Tepleski purposely situated his subjects in the very river that will flood their homes. In the photos the only discernible remnant of the river exists as a reflection of the human, a memory.

These strange and disorienting photos are by Richard Mosse of Eastern Congo. Here’s the New Yorker Photobooth blog’s explanation of his process:

Mosse used Aerochrome, an obsolete technology, to create an alternative image of the complex social and political dynamics of the country. The film, designed in connection with the United States military during the Cold War, reveals a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can perceive. He aims “to shock the viewer with this surprising bubblegum palette, and provoke questions about how we tend to see, and don’t see, this conflict.”

“I saw this soldier lingering as his commanders talked nearby, and became intrigued by his character; his posture seemed cocky yet vulnerable. His gaze defies the camera,” Mosse wrote. “I knew the vegetation would turn bright pink, and I felt this imposition on his masculinity to be a kind of double violation.”

Generally, I don’t like “gimmicky” photos. Fish eye lens drive me crazy, over saturated images can hide poor composition, and stylization can trump content. But I really like these images. As a photographer interested in Africa, I’ve seen a billion of photos of Eastern Congo. Few stick with me but these ones do. They utilize an alternative process for a purpose and a reason. And in my eyes, they do so successfully.

Readers — do you like these photos? Or do you think they don’t say all that much?

From a great series of portraits, Congo: 50 years, 50 faces by Stephan Vanfleteren.

Jean-Claude Lusumba, photographer, Kisangani ‘I have to pay $25 each year to be allowed to photograph in the street, and even then I often have to pay bribes to soldiers so they don’t confiscate my camera. Even with an innocent family photo under a tree, the soldiers can claim that that tree is an “object of military importance”. Because there is no work, I started photographing people in the street. I have my films developed by the Lebanese for 300 Congolese francs. I have to be careful with the pictures. Often two exposures per portrait, three at most. But always with flash. That makes the person more clearly visible and it is also more important. Flash is for starlets, and that’s what we Congolese like. Apart from the films and developing, the batteries for the flash gun are a heavy expense. A wedding photo costs $1, a funeral photo $2. Why twice as much? People always come to collect a wedding photo but that’s far less likely with a photo of a corpse.’

Filed under: things I want for my next birthday. Take note, friends and family, that next year simply writing on my facebook wall will not be enough.

Read more about the golden chukadu on Rachel’s blog.