Sanele Resting in Field. 2021
Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Edition of 3 + 2AP
80 x 100cm
Archival Pigment Print
Born the year after Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and apartheid was officially abolished, the lyrical documentary photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b.1995) is a member of the so-called ‘born free’ generation. Were they not both so lived-in and alive to the world, it would be difficult to separate his images from the question of what being born free really means.
Emerging from a country still grappling with structural inequities and struggling to translate political freedom into prosperity (for two decades, South Africa’s joblessness rate has exceeded 20%), Sobekwa’s work balances defiance and intimacy. At 17, township peers in the grip of nyaope — a black tar heroin-based drug — asked Sobekwa to take their portraits. While he soon found himself inadvertently compiling an exposé of an epidemic, he uncovered incorrigible, trick-candle humanity in the process. The breakout series, Nyaope, pitched lives sinking like old mattresses against Sobekwa’s distinct brand of humanism, reliant on the easy atmosphere of collaboration between the photographer and his subjects.
From close quarters, bars of daylight harshing darkened rooms, Sobekwa has turned his attention to villages, pylons, livestock, the hills and the horizon — a near constant line as if drawn through Ezilalini (The Country), a more sweeping body of work in both setting and spirit. Captured during the 9-hour drive from the photographer’s home in Johannesburg to the Eastern Cape, the series sees Sobekwa ‘trying to connect with’ his family’s history there, he says, informed by oral histories along the way. His father and his first wife were the first to have a white wedding in Donkey Church (2020), a structure since ‘burned by a mentally ill person’. Now, nature has taken over — much like the donkeys grazing and grass growing over the memorial stones in My mother visiting our ancestors’ graveyard (2020).
In Sanele Resting in Field, Sobekwa's nephew wears a cheerfully blue, striped T-shirt that contrasts with the dirty indigo sky. The field is lush and green and folds to hold him snugly. Yellow flowers are scattered optimistic as sunglint all the way to the narrow band of the horizon, above which a steam-train-ish plume of cloud hints at disquiet, industry; unsettled dust. In the early 1990s, the field Sanele is relaxing in ‘was a battlefield’, Sobekwa says, a site where the factional violence between supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Mandela-led African National Congress (ANC) was captured by conflict photographers The Bang-Bang Club.
Like Santu Mofokeng, Sobekwa’s photographs find expansiveness in the everyday; ordinary is all he needs. In a place of historical unrest, Sanele rests. Seemingly lost in meditation, eyes closed, the image is perhaps best understood as an object of meditation for the viewer: before, and tomorrow. The clouds in the distance; lush leaves on the skin.
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