It is difficult to anticipate how grief will evolve in time. Someone once told me grief never leaves you and that, instead, it moves. The most unexpected things might trigger it to do so: the way a word is pronounced, a texture, the color pink, the color grey, the color blue, the beginning of a song. Whatever, really. And so it happens, grief moves from the back, to the side, or straight up to the front of your mind. It comes and goes, but sometimes, the more gentle days, the reminder of having lost someone appears only obliquely.

Hanif Abdurraqib argues grief is an ongoing event; as long as we are alive and the person we love is not, it never stops. At a talk organized by the Scatter Joy Project in August, Abdurraqib sustained: “If you believe, as I do, grief is just an emotion that’s knocking on the door of memory asking you to recall something, then there’s real gratitude in that. There’s real gratitude in that recollection, in me reaching out for my mother’s voice even when I don’t retrieve it, because I am reaching for my mother nonetheless. It reminds me that I am losing a person over and over and over, but by losing them I get to return to the site of their living that I can recall, and that is celebratory.”

It can be anti-intuitive to think about the possibility of celebration within loss in a place like South Africa. But not for photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa, and not because there is a lack of proximity with the subject matter, or because he is unaware of the political and economic context in which his projects are located. On the contrary. With the closeness and depth that it is required to publicly expose his own losses and the losses of others, he visits places of pain, which sometimes are, of course, places of peace and beauty too. He goes to the Brit Dam, to the intersection in Khumalo Street where he was run over by a car, he stops to observe an uprooted tree in a beach in the Eastern Cape. In these places, he taps into different memories: his own, those of his relatives, and those of people he knows nothing about.

In a conversation with him I came to realize this has become a sort of methodology. With his own movements from central Johannesburg back to where he grew up in Thokoza, to his grandmother’s home in the Eastern Cape, and in different moments in time to communities where he felt alienated, like Daleside, he embodies a profound—spiritual, if I may—intention of knowing more, of going deeper.

For Sobekwa, “going back” to places as a photographer means “getting at least to a certain level of connection to people, getting people to ease up around me. People teach you something, they teach you how they want to be seen. And you also introduce how you see the world to them, and then you try to find a common ground. In a lot of the places I photograph I have childhood memories, or I’m going back to a place of oral history, or a place where an accident happened. So that ‘going back,’ I think it also has to do with something with me, with trying to reinterpret the space, the landscape.”

When he was only six years old, Lindokuhle’s sister Ziyanda disappeared for eleven years and passed away shortly after returning to Lindokuhle’s family home. He then began to trace the places where she lived and the people whom she spent time with during all those years. He explores this in his series I carry Her photo with Me (2017—ongoing), but being vulnerable and opening up publicly about a personal loss of this magnitude “was not easy” for Sobekwa:

I didn’t really understand the kind of depth I was going to … I never, even when my sister passed away, I never cried … I felt strange about that, you know? I thought to myself: “Do I really still hold on to the past like that, that I will not shed a tear for someone that meant so much in my life?” And I felt guilty about this. When I did this project, for the first time, tears were running through my face. Throughout the project, I was so emotional. Even worse when I was photographing, there were moments that I could not believe the life she lived. I could not lift up the camera, I left places feeling very exhausted, and it was difficult to accept some of the stuff I was hearing from family members. I think I was very naive about it. Because I thought it would heal me. But a photograph cannot heal you, searching for something like that cannot heal you … You also need other ways to look for that type of work—which is what I have also been doing—but retelling that story and undergoing through something myself has helped me a lot.

Sobekwa has recently opened Umkhondo: Going Deeper, a solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) as part of the FNB Art Prize awarded to him in 2023. The title nods to something central in the exhibition: umkhondo translates to “trace,” pointing towards Sobekwa’s own creative and emotional search. The exhibition features two interconnected bodies of work: I carry Her photo with Me and Ezilalini (The Country) (2018—ongoing), where Sobekwa travels to his maternal family home in Tsomo, where his sister was raised and is now buried, and his paternal family home in Qumbu.

One of the artworks in the exhibition, a film titled “I carry Her photo with Me” (2021), features one of Lindokuhle’s sketchbooks, which was originally a private notebook but was later edited and published by Mack Books. As the pages turn, we hear Nduduzo Makhathini’s piano. We see a broken glass, a family photo with Ziyanda’s face cut off, Lindokuhle’s mother reading the Bible, a pink dress. Every image has a handwritten caption by the photographer. Although in some pages, we just read Sobekwa’s notes. A black-and-white photograph shows Lindokuhle’s home at the time, on fire. The caption reads: We lost everything. We lost our home. Remembering that moment, he recalled how much it marked him:

People were trying to extinguish the fire while I was taking pictures. I remember an uncle of mine, who was visiting us at that time, who was so furious with me … Even the neighbors were saying, “What is this boy doing? Is he crazy?” I think I took a couple of shots and I felt guilty, I put the camera down, and I started helping. Something important happened then, when I had all of these attacks and criticism from family and loved ones, who were of course saying that I was crazy and I should help out … That is: to know when to put down the camera. Not everything is worth being photographed. Know when to take out the camera and photograph. It’s in moments like that that you learn as a photographer. Where you learn about the limits of others and the limits of yourself.

The topic of disappearances has not been widely addressed in the contemporary arts in South Africa, something that Lindokuhle courageously takes the initiative to explore. And I say “courageously” because he begins speaking about this from his own experience, in which his sister wasn’t the only family member who disappeared. He told me that his grandfather came to Johannesburg and never went back to the Eastern Cape, something he hardly ever spoke about with his family, and that an aunt of his went to Cape Town, and they didn’t know of her whereabouts for years:

There is a pattern … There are people we didn’t really speak about. My grandfather came here [to Johannesburg] in the 1960s to work as a mine worker. During those times mine workers would leave their homes in the countryside (or wherever) and come to Johannesburg to work. And then in January and December is when they could see their families. So he did not return; that’s the story we hear. Also under apartheid, black people would be arrested randomly, so I think there was a point that they looked for him, but then they gave up … There was the assumption that maybe he died or something happened to him.

During the process of making the Ezilalini series, Lindokuhle realized that trees were a powerful symbol for what he was trying to say about his family, his beliefs in ancestors, the history of the Eastern Cape, and about life broadly. One of the central works at JAG is Lindokuhle’s own take of a family tree titled uMthimkhulu III (2022), which is a mixed-media piece on cotton fabric featuring annotations, drawings and framed photographs. Lindokuhle said he was “thinking of the family tree as a place of stories, of events and clan names. As me singing praise to the clan … Rather than the traditional ‘mother-father’ kind of family tree.” He also brought to my attention the presence of  drawn signs and symbols in the family tree piece, which he explained “come from pre-colonial times and were used to send messages between other tribes,” something he learnt because of his interest in the life and work of Credo Mutwa.

One of Lindokuhle’s most popular photographs features Gogo Lucy Zwane in her thriving garden in Thokoza, which won pavement garden competitions and has become a highly sought-after venue in the community for wedding, anniversary, and birthday photoshoots. The property is located in front of the Mshayazafe hostel, where Lindokuhle’s sister stayed while her family was looking for her. This serene garden has also witnessed violence; in the early 1990s, Thokoza and Katlehong were sites of severe political turmoil as the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the African National Congress (ANC), and the apartheid security forces clashed in what some refer to as the “township wars.” A history whose complexities are unfortunately underexplored, especially after the ANC’s 1994 win and the party’s dominant narrative. Lindokuhle shared something remarkable: amid that turmoil, the garden was often damaged during armed conflicts, yet Zwane would restore it over and over again in a methodical, almost religious manner.

Meghan O’Rourke, writing about Anne Carson’s photo-book Nox (2010), says: “A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.” In part, that’s also true for Sobekwa, except that he finds testimonial force in a larger national story that, he discovers, is transcribed in the landscape: in uprooted trees, in the erosion of the land, in the tense beauty of sites that have witnessed all sorts of violence. And thus relating to a notion of peace very particular to South Africa’s history and geography; always tumultuous, never linear, often contradictory. There is a resemblance between Sobekwa’s process and Gogo Lucy Zwane’s determination to protect her garden. A desire to build something of their own that endures, no matter how many times someone or something tries to destroy it.