Recently the series ‘Phantoms of the Congo River’ of Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo is published in a book.
About:
Born in Burkina Faso in 1978, Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo works and lives between Paris and West Africa. Originally a promising track athlete, an injury caused Ouedraogo to reconsider his career plans. He became a photographer through curiosity; he wanted to see and understand the world. Similarly he figured cameras out – he is a self-taught photographer.
About the book:
In Phantoms of the Congo River, Nyaba L. Ouedraogo offers a new dimension to his approach to photography.
The Phantoms of the Congo River is inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness”. This series shows a new facet of the esthetic research taken up by the photographer since 2011. As the setting for these new works he has chosen the riverbanks of Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo.
With The Phantoms of the Congo River, Nyaba L. Ouedraogo adopts a different photographic posture. Through this series he intends to get back in touch with his own spirituality. Here lies the future of each individual and his own beliefs or hopes. This photographic narrative expresses rather than describes a reality. The photographer develops a language of ritual and of the mystical to evoke the unknown and to see the strange.
The use of light by the artist for a careful orchestration amplifies even more the feeling of an artistic study of unknown, sometimes vague spaces, but which are very much alive. Leaving pathos aside, Nyaba L. Ouedraogo leads us towards horizons where our sense of time is tested. In one image we can see a glimmer of hope on a face. In another a pile of ruins that hints at the desolation of an urban landscape. Ultimately, it is the world we are looking at through these images. There is the dynamism of this series; the images cause each viewer to question his own condition and his own reality. These images invite us to navigate this river imprinted with humanity, just as the photographer went back down the Congo.
The work is structured on oppositions such as violence and peace, shadows and light, clarity or blurriness, as if the photographer meant to find himself anew in a world where any tension should be forgotten in favor of coming together. The unknown body that the photographer speaks of may seem distant, but it is with this similarity that we cohabit.
From this art book we are struck first and foremost by the photographic intensity and the uniqueness of the subject treated by the artist (press release publisher).
The book is just published.
Dealers of Copper:
His series ‘Dealers of Copper’ (2008) is shown all over the world.
Copyright: the photographer