The third leg of the 'Critical Minerals' project took me to the Democratic Republic of Congo to document the condition and impact of the mining of Copper and Cobalt, essential for the green energy transition.
The environmental and human conditions of mining have been widely reported, and the mainstream narrative faithfully describes the devastating working conditions, the quasi-slave-like exploitation and the problematic health, environmental and economic conditions that men, women, and often children are subjected to, directly or indirectly involved in mining.
Kolwezi, Democratic republic of Congo (DRC). August 2023. – Mutoshi artisanal mining (ASM) COMIAKOL cooperative. View of the open artisanal mining and the tunnels digged manually. In early 2018, Chemaf set out to develop the Mutoshi concession near Kolwezi (a city of approximately 500,000 people). The cooperative intends to guarantee better conditions for 5,000 informal miners working in artisanal mining. The formalisation meant controlled access to the mine site by the partners involved in the project, open-pit operations, training and higher health and safety standards, and creating a shared financial opportunity for the local community. The reality is way different. Despite the intentions, miners dig for cobalt and copper in harsh conditions, often barefoot in tunnels much deeper than the 30mt declared. Moreover, they no longer had the opportunity to store ore until prices increased to negotiate a better deal with the company that owns the concession. Instead, they now depend on the terms set by a Chinese middleman firm operating illicitly at the accommodation and selling to larger cobalt processing companies in China, the world’s largest importer of cobalt.
Besides the industrialised mines, more than 200,000 creuseurs (diggers) excavate the rich subsoil of Upper Katanga at the limit of legality or organised in cooperatives. With only the strength of their arms and rudimentary hammers and chisels, they plunge, at the risk of their lives and for a few dollars, into kilometres of tunnels little more than a metre wide and up to 60 metres deep. The view is reminiscent of apocalyptic or biblical scenes.
For several years, I have limited representation of people in my photos. Equally, I rarely accept work in places I know little about and where it is challenging to work independently. This is also why the "Critical Minerals" project is always, and at each stage, the result of a collaboration with a local photographer or storyteller who contributes his or her narrative to the collective project.
In the case of this trip, how could I carefully begin to represent the human condition, which is the story's central theme? Better still, how could I do it while avoiding the stereotypes and tropes of suffering, the preconceptions of the colonial image, and the gaze on the 'other'?
I am reminded of the writings of Ariella Azoulay, who places the 'birth of photography' (documentary?) with the discovery of the New World. Provocatively, but not without convincing explanations, her theory compares the photographic act, the 'superior' gaze of the photographic image, to a veritable practice of colonisation and violence. The first Western 'gaze' on the unknown that thinks it has 'discovered' something that has always been there is, as a matter of fact, arrogant and violent as the act of photographing and recording.
White, western, I was about to leave, for the first time, for a country whose colonial history is among the most devastating in Africa. The exploitation of natural resources, from the Europeans in the last century to the Chinese today, has left scars on people’s psyche and society. Those wounds are not only visible; they are, even today, reopened and sustained. No form of welfare, no logistical or social infrastructure has been the bargaining chip for this plunder and violent pillage. There is no monetary or intellectual reward to the local population other than the patronage of a few local officials and leaders who are often as corrupt and brutal as their colonisers.
How could I balance my need to document with responsibility and avoid perpetrating another subjugation with my representation?
Some evenings, after the days spent working and making contacts for the next day, I sit down with Guerchom, the young local photographer collaborating on this part of the project. We take the opportunity to edit and make some assessments of the day. During one of these conversations, I expressed my difficulties finding the right balance between documentation and the risk of falling into stereotypes. Again, I try to explain my embarrassment in photographing people to whom I appear, rightly so, as a foreigner and, in some cases, as yet another exploiter, albeit armed only with a camera.
It is a dilemma that has been debated for a long time in the world of documentary photography and photojournalism, and that has triggered, throughout the history of photography, extreme and discordant positions between those who believe that there is a duty to report and those who reject it in the name of a careful and highly contemporary assessment of the role of representation.
This is particularly true when it concerns the representation of suffering, poverty, wars and, more generally, an uneasy human condition narrated by outsider observers. After 25 years of work, I still seek a comprehensive formula to solve the Gordian knot.
Guerchom has a good eye for the image. His young background comes mainly from the experience of covering the country's often complex news events for international news agencies. He does this excellently, but he also seems to feel constrained in a narrative that perhaps does not belong to him culturally or emotionally. He is curious about what new forms of narrative might be. I suggest that he look at recent authors who, in my opinion, have laboriously developed new languages of representation but also review old masters who today might seem archaic and objectionable in the historical context of the photographic image we are getting used to today.
Inside, I ponder how to portray with “dignity” a human condition that appears “objectively” desperate. But am I looking carefully enough?
I abhor images of workers whose postures are dishevelled, deformed, disabling. I try not to dwell on details that accentuate signs of poverty; I shy away from framing individuals too closely when I recognise that the representation is not about the individual but rather of the community they are part of.
I discard every night images that seem to me the repetition of existing images that reveal frivolity of gaze and a superficial understanding of the issue.
Dignity: Respect that man, aware of his own worth on a moral level, must feel towards himself and translate into appropriate behaviour and demeanour. A condition of moral nobility in which man is placed by his rank, intrinsic qualities, and very nature as a man, and at the same time, the respect that is due to him for this condition and that he owes to himself.
I recognise some of these qualities in the men who descend into the tunnels to dig the stones with only the strength of their hands; I recognise style, beauty, and care in the clothes they wear for the Sunday mass or in the evening after work. I can see their physical and moral strength when they pose for a portrait: their posture changes. Becomes almost heroic.
In 'Frames of War' Judith Butler writes - and in this case, I associate it with the moment of looking and photographing - that 'one should distinguish between "apprehending" and "recognising" a life. [...] "Apprehension" is less precise since it can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full cognition." She continues a few lines: "When a picture is framed, any number of ways of commenting on or extending the picture may be at stake."
I wonder if the consciousness of my thoughts puts me on the side of those who are capable of acknowledging and if acknowledging comes through the photograph and the image or instead through knowledge of the context in which one operates, one's education and sensibility. Most probably from all these things together and who knows what others.
Before I left, I read many articles and a few books to get an idea of the history and development of the country's mining industry from the colonial period to the present day and how I could tell the story. Among several, I was very impressed by the criticism of Siddharth Kara's book 'Cobalt Red'. The book is a rather detailed account of the system and conditions of artisanal mining.
In an article in Open Democracy, it is described as “a regressive, deeply flawed account of Congo's mining industry”.
Having read a bit of it, I must admit the book perpetuates a Western, dramatising and stereotypical vision without, for example, questioning how the organisation of artisanal miners into cooperatives can be if formalised and managed appropriately, a social and economic opportunity for the local population to break free from the exploitative grip of large foreign mining companies.
Indeed, the conditions I also faced once in the mine, the authorities’ corruption that manage these cooperatives, and an endemic basic survival economy do not promise the acquisition of safety standards or working conditions to which we are accustomed in the West. But how can this be expected to change suddenly after centuries of abuse, violence, appropriation and exploitation? Above all, how can it change while denying the local population the chance to shape its own future?
I keep asking myself these questions with every image I make, wondering what aesthetic or narrative stratagem, beyond my consciousness, can convey the situation's complexity in photographs. Perhaps Sontag was right when she wrote that the image alone cannot express, let alone change, our understanding of the world and that it needs context and captions to be complete and effective.
If so, every photograph accompanied by the proper caption could be valid, and any aesthetic value might only mean something to the author's ego. At the same time, an image accompanied by extra-photographic information becomes just an image decorated with some knowledge. Is this a plus today in the vast sea of photographs? Isn’t it more probable that the extra information and the photo itself, may be lost between the author's irresponsibility and the spectator's distraction?
Then, an aesthetic choice, and even more so, a strong and uncommon narrative strategy, becomes fundamental again. Narrative and Aesthetics add consciousness, support the message, conduct the rhythm and compel the interpretation. They are the things which distinguish one photo from another, in the same way, a piece of classical music conducted by a particular conductor reveals precise nuances and peculiarities of the music unheard in others' interpretations.
The search for an "always valid" formula that would allow me to combine documentary value, ethical questions and aesthetic and narrative power might, I suspect, remain elusive. Nevertheless, my belief in the potential of visual storytelling to engender change – in this case, on the artisanal miners of Congo – means I will continue to experiment with photography and other visual languages to contribute to strengthening the collective effort of change.
