For the Democratic Republic of Congo elections in July last year, voters were not spoilt for choice. Presented with a bewildering 3Â 400 candidates — 33 of them presidential — citizens of this sweltering equatorial country had to negotiate a poster-sized, six-page ballot paper when casting their vote. Sloganeering took into account the seemingly endless rows of thumbnail portraits of contenders.
Photographer Guy Tillim — showing concurrently at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg and Extraspazio in Rome — notes in his exhibition catalogue that campaigns did not say “Vote Adam Bombole, Health for All”, for example, but “Vote Adam Bombole, page 3 No 438”. Tillim, the current recipient of the Harvard University Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, chose to show the ballot paper as an official document of the most recent step in a process that has, in less than a decade, resulted in the death of nearly four million people.
In response to his question about the large number of candidates, a Congolese friend of Tillim’s had a theory that “visibility is everything”. He said the idea was to “get yourself on the list, so that when the next thing happens, perhaps a peace agreement where power and influence are divided up, you will be on it somewhere”.
Tillim notes that this theory is in keeping with the proof over the past few years that Joseph Kibila and rival Jean-Pierre Bemba “have been at war with each other and control separate armies now barricaded in Kinshasa, have unofficially divided up these spoils for years”.
Tillim has been photographing in the DRC for the past four years, documenting the path to democracy from what many historians believe was one of the most brutally sadistic and avaricious episodes of colonisation in modern times. In his 50 years of rule from 1870, Leopold ll of Belgium set the groundwork for the transformation of one of the potentially most wealthy countries in Africa to a territory being torn apart by greed, corruption and civil war.
Two bodies of work construct Congo Democratic. The first is a series of 16 black-and-white portraits, selected from a larger study of the Mai-Mai militia taken at their base in Beni in eastern DRC in 2003. The young soldiers, many of them still children, are camouflaged with vegetation and carry logs as surrogate AK47s.
Although violence is ever present, Tillim chooses not to focus his camera on the bloody dramas that have defined the genre of war photography. His current body of work shies away from the “money shot”, choosing instead to capture the process on either side of the “main event”. Tillim subverts his use of the language of photoÂjournalism by not presenting images of gore but rather offers a series of large-format pigment prints he refers to as “context”.
“The mass-media images of the Congo,” he says, “come with their own list of preconceptions and clichés that have very little to do with the majority of people living there. In reality an event is made up of more impulses than one can imagine.”
By focusing on the “things in-between”, Tillim deprives the powerful of their brawn, and bestows value to the act of living. The depiction of context has become something of trademark for Tillim, and he employs a number of sure-handed strategies in this pursuit.
Most literally, Tillim shows the lie of the land and, in many images, the texture of the littered street is given prominence, as is the brooding, charged, sky. Giving equal importance to the landscapes (and skyscapes) as he does to its inhabitants is Tillim’s method “to let a place speak for itself; to allow the place to dictate what [I] choose to photograph.” It is this form of organic guidance that allowed Tillim to develop that indefinable thing called intuition; that feeling in his photographs that stems “from the place itself”.
Guy Tillim’s Congo Democratic at the Goodman Gallery Until February 10