Lindokuhle Sobekwa has been awarded South Africa’s 2023 FNB Art Prize. He becomes the first artist using documentary photography as his primary medium to win the prestigious competition.
Born in Katlehong in 1995, Sobekwa began learning photography skills in 2012, through the Of Soul and Joy photography education programme in Thokoza township, where his family had moved. He knew, as a young boy, that he thought in images, visualising what he experienced. Encountering cameras, he realised there was equipment – a small machine, a perforated roll of clear plastic, and a chemical reaction – able to externalise his thought processes.
Thokoza, like many settlements on the outskirts of South African towns and cities, exists because of colonial and apartheid spatial segregation. Black South Africans weren’t permitted to live in “whites only” residential areas, yet provided essential, low-paid labour for the city. They created accommodation from whatever materials they found to build shelter.
