“What a journey!” exclaimed Lindokuhle Sobekwa, the 30-year-old Johannesburg-based artist who final night time picked up modern pictures’s largest prize.
He was in London to obtain his £30,000 award because the 2025 recipient of the Deutsche Börse Images Basis Prize. It’s given in recognition of his photobook, I carry Her photograph with Me, a piece that makes use of a scrapbook aesthetic collectively together with his images and handwritten notes to talk about the lack of his sister. The work additionally goals to create a wider dialogue in regards to the phenomena of disappearances in his dwelling nation, and to discover the continued legacy of apartheid and colonialism.
The South African photographer, one of many “born free” era, was raised within the township of Katlehong within the years that adopted his nation’s first democratic elections. He solely took up pictures in 2012, when he took half within the Of Soul and Pleasure Venture, a close-by programme for high-school learners. One in every of his mentors was Bieke Depoorter, the Belgian photographer who was shortlisted for a similar prize in 2023.
Sobekwa is the fourth photographer born in Africa to win the prize previously 5 years
Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Aged 19, Sobekwa’s work documenting a brand new drug cocktail that was ravaging Black townships throughout the nation, was revealed in a South African newspaper and overseas, and was exhibited in Johannesburg on the Turbine Artwork Honest, devoted to rising and mid-career artists. The next 12 months, in 2015, he was given a scholarship to review on the influential Market Picture Workshop, the identical place that final 12 months’s winner—fellow South African, Lebohang Kganye—had studied, which was arrange by David Goldblatt, who was shortlisted for the prize in 2004.
And Sobekwa has nonetheless extra connections to the Deutsche Börse prize’s previous winners and shortlisted photographers. In 2017, he was chosen by the Magnum Basis’s Images and Social Justice Program to develop I carry Her photograph with Me. The inspiration’s president is Susan Meiselas, the winner of the 2019 prize.
Sobekwa joined Magnum Photographs as a nominee in 2018 and have become a full member in 2022. He later collaborated with one other of the distinguished photograph company’s photographers, Mikhael Subotzky, who along with Patrick Waterhouse, was the winner of the 2015 prize.
Sobekwa is the fourth photographer born in Africa to win the prize previously 5 years. There have been 4 South African winners previously 12 years, and an additional 5 have been shortlisted—testomony to the affect the nation’s photographers have made since its transition to democracy. Sobekwa can be the fourth member of Magnum to win the prize previously 14 years.
The opposite shortlisted artists for this 12 months’s prize are Rahim Fortune, Tarrah Krajnak and Cristina De Middel—the present Magnum president, who was beforehand shortlisted in 2013—who every obtain £5000.
- I carry Her photograph with Me, revealed by Mack, 2024
- Deutsche Börse Images Basis Prize 2025, an exhibition showcasing work by all 4 shortlisted artists, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, till 15 June
