Killer Lake (12 x 18") (Print 1 of 7)
Location: Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Year: 2016
Size: 12 x 18” Image Size.
Limited Edition: Print 1 in an Edition of 7 (Plus 2 Artist Proofs). Signed, dated and numbered.
Paper: Museum-Quality Archival Pigment Print.
Includes: Artist Stamped Certificate of Authenticity.
Details: Lake Kivu is one of just three “killer lakes” on earth. It sits between Congo and Rwanda like a sheet of hammered glass, hiding both beauty and threat in its depths. On this evening, the air had that strange quiet Congo sometimes gives you — a kind of pause before the world remembers itself. Youth climbed the low branches that twisted over the shoreline, launching themselves into water that has carried generations.
In a place where so much is shaped by conflict, extraction, and the weight of history, this stretch of shoreline felt suspended — youth swimming, laughing, daring gravity; standing in the dusk light, taking a breath from the pulse of the city in front of them. Moments like this don’t cancel Congo’s hardships, but they reveal something else it holds: an instinct for joy that rises in spite of everything pressing down.
In Goma, beauty and danger share the same skin. Volcanic rock forms the bones of the city. Mt. Nyiragongo’s lava lake — the largest in the world — glows off corrugated metal rooftops and into the clouds like a god with a bleeding mouth. And just behind these youth, Kivu’s stillness conceals gasses powerful enough to erase the millions living along it’s shoreline. Yet none of that touched them here. They were weightless, unburdened — small birds catching air before gravity calls them back.
I crossed this border between Congo and Rwanda dozens of times, following stories carved from war, minerals, and the quiet courage of ordinary life. Images like this remind me that even in a place worn by conflict, people still reach for the branches, still laugh, still climb, still leap. They carry on with a resilience that’s easy to romanticize but far harder to understand until you’ve seen how quickly a crowd can become a verdict, or how easily a small force — an ant, a rumor, a decision — can reshape a life.
For a moment, as the sun fell behind the mountains of the Albertine Rift, Congo let its edges soften. And the kids showed me what remains here beneath the volatility: the simple insistence on being alive.
Made on assignment for Bloomberg. From the series East Congo.