Leonora Baumann
Item
11000 Carcassonne, France
There is one thing Leonora never gave up to grow: Her appetite for stories. Quickly though, hearing them wasn’t enough, and her envy shifted towards witnessing, understanding, and telling them.
Her first story almost knocked to her door, in Bruxelles, after she graduated from a bachelor in photography and visual arts studies. She started to photograph a street juggler, Hicham, and ended up spending more than a year documenting the precarious equilibrium of his life. One day in the joyful mess of the embassy his community occupied, one night in an Emergency Department after he got beaten up.
This balance between good times and bad times is a thread that was to be found again in Leonora’s following projects in Morocco, India, Poland, or Turkey where she has –among others- documented the Gezi Park protests in 2013.
In 2014, she completes her education with a bachelor in “documentary photography and transmedia storytelling”, and achieves an internship at a Congolese newspaper in Kinshasa, DRC. Since then, she has never stopped going back there to carry on with her personal projects and to fulfill assignments from NGOs and international media.
Her personal work mainly explores the women condition in the DRC, with a focus on girls-mothers and maternity as well as environmental issues such as deforestation and its consequences on local populations and on the global climate.
Until October 2019 and for almost two years, she has been working as Public Information Officer - Multi-media Specialist for the United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti (MINUJUSTH)
Commissioned works: WFP, UNHAS, MSF, BBC, Radio France, UNHCR, le JDD, Duży Format (Gazeta Wyborcza), Le Potentiel, Newcomer (The Bulletin), Cafebabel, EMAJ Magazine...
2017 - Women Photograph Grant + Pulitzer Center. , 2016 - Bourse du Talent #65 Reportage (France), 2015 - Prix Mentor (France), 2014 - Grand Prix Paris Match du photogreportage etudiant, 2012 - MAP Photo Festival of Toulouse (France)
- Audio capture
- Conflict
- Corporate
- Interview
- Medical
- Military embed
- Portrait
- Reporting
- RISC training
- Video capture
Hicham life at a crossroads
Leonora Baumann
In less than a year, Hicham occupies a squat in a former embassy, gets beaten up in a drug-related incident, and leaves the squat to try to set up in another abandoned embassy. He is expelled after one week and goes to live in a teepee beside a railway line in one of Brussels' richest neighbourhoods.
My project is an intimate account of a man in search for answers in his daily struggle at the intersection of art, violence and solidarity.
Mother befor being woman
Leonora Baumann
In North-Kivu, a province of the Democratic Republic of Congo severely affected by more than 20 years of armed conflicts, almost 25% of the girls aged 15-19 have already given birth (2013/2014 study for Health and Demographics). Early pregnancy, whether due to war rapes, pre-marital or forced relationships, often results in a rejection of the teenage mother by her family and community. Motherhood, an important rite of passage for the Congolese women, is considered shameful if it happens out of an official union.