Léonard Pongo

Léonard Pongo was born in 1988 in Belgium to Congolese parents and works between Brussels and Kinshasa. He works primarily in photography, having developed a practice that engages with the complex histories of Congo-Belgium relations and the politics of photographic representation in Central Africa. His photographic work is notable for its intimacy and its sustained attention to individuals and communities — images that resist both the aestheticization of poverty and the exoticizing distance that has characterized much Western photographic engagement with the DRC.

Photography remains the center of Pongo's practice, and his long-term projects — including Primordial Earth — are built through immersive, extended engagements with specific places and communities in the DRC and beyond. He has more recently begun to explore jacquard textile production as an extension of his photographic work, translating images into woven fabric through industrial looms, though this remains a new and emerging direction within an oeuvre that is fundamentally photographic in its concerns.

Pongo has exhibited internationally at major photography festivals and institutions across Europe and Africa. His work has been shown in the context of both documentary photography and contemporary art, and he has received recognition for his long-form projects on the DRC and on the history of Congo-Belgium relations.