As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in 2020, swiftly closing down borders, Finbarr O’Reilly and 11 Congolese photographers—who were collaborating on a vast project addressing the human, social and ecological challenges that the DRC faces today—quickly adapted themselves to the new reality and created a unique collaborative online chronicle. It is an uninterrupted and unprecedented stream of articles, photo essays, and videos housed on a dedicated website called “Congo in Conversation” that has also resulted in a bilingual monograph of the same name. The 11th Carmignac Photojournalism Award funded the project.
Finbarr and Bernadette Vivuya, one of the project’s contributors, join Ziyah Gafic to discuss their collaboration and the project’s evolution. They’ll also speak more broadly about diversity and representation and photojournalistic narratives from Congo and Africa.
