LONDON, ENGLAND.-The Photographer's Gallery presents Guy Tillim - Leopold and Mobutu, on view through September 25, 2005. Guy Tillim (b.1962, Johannesburg) has developed an international reputation for his compelling photographs documenting the people and landscape of Southern Africa. This exhibition will include over 30 colour and black & white images produced mainly in 2002 and 2003 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The exhibition is timely: this year the country is due to hold its first democratic elections and Tillim's powerful body of work considers how the country's colonial and political legacy is still visible today.

In several of the works we see references to the explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley who 'discovered' the Congo in the 1880s. He was employed by, and greatly aided, Leopold II (1835 - 1909), King of the Belgians, who in 1885 declared himself the Sovereign King of the Congo Free State. The country then became the only major colony recognised by the West, owned by one man who was able to exploit both its rich natural resources and its population. Today it is estimated that over the following 40 years, half of the Congolese population, perhaps as many as 15 million people, were massacred or lost their lives through starvation, hard labour and disease. After the end of colonial rule, the autocratic ruler Mobutu Sese Seko (1930–1997) became the next person to assume Leopold's mantle when he became the President of Zaire (formerly Congo) and ruled with ruthless power for 32 years from 1965.

Tillim has visited Mobutu’s residence at Gbadolite, which, in its palatial grandeur, reflects how much this African leader modelled himself on his colonial predecessor and was to similarly exploit the land for his own personal gain. These photographs show the crumbling palaces, empty and discarded – mausoleums to a more recent history of oppression. Coupled with these striking interiors and landscapes, Tillim’s portraits of child Mai Mai soldiers, wearing leaves as camouflage, appear to be the contemporary reincarnation of the young African troops who were forced into colonial armies in the late 1880s. In other photographs refugees crowd the roads as combat erupts between rival warlords. These images reveal the current and daily threats to everyday life.

Tillim has borne witness to the humanitarian crimes and the historical legacy that the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo have endured. The writer Adam Hochschild comments in his recent text on the Tillim's work: “Mark Twain was one of many American and European writers who were outraged by what they learned from photographs and eyewitness accounts of the atrocities in the Congo. In his King Leopold’s Soliloquy,he imagines the King gloating over his money but raging against his enemies, particularly “the incorruptible Kodak . . . the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe.” The ‘Kodak’ is still incorruptible, and in Tillim’s hands has been an eloquent witness to the suffering and exploitation that continue in the Congo today.”