The Art Edit | Why the World Can’t Look Away from Sobekwa’s Images
Lindokuhle Sobekwa is one of the most compelling young photographers working today. Born in 1995 in Bekkersdal, a township near Johannesburg, South Africa, he started photographing as a teenager. What began as a curiosity quickly became a tool to document life around him — to capture stories often overlooked and voices too rarely heard.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Sobekwa’s work is rooted in the communities he knows intimately. His early series, Nyaope, examines the devastating impact of a cheap street drug on young people in his township. He shows the people behind the headlines: friends, neighbors, and families navigating daily life in the shadow of addiction. The images are raw and unflinching, but never exploitative. Sobekwa captures moments of tension, resilience, and humanity, revealing the complexity of lives often reduced to statistics.
Other projects expand his focus while keeping that same authenticity. In Daleside, he documents abandoned homes and empty streets, exploring the traces people leave behind and the memory embedded in everyday spaces. I Carry Her Photo With Me examines personal loss and remembrance, showing how small objects, photographs, and domestic spaces hold emotional weight. Through these series, Sobekwa finds stories in the overlooked and ordinary, turning them into images that feel immediate and lived-in.
Visually, Sobekwa’s work is striking. High-contrast black-and-white images emphasize form, texture, and emotion, while his color photographs create atmosphere and depth, capturing both light and shadow in ways that feel raw yet deliberate. His compositions are direct, often using the environment to frame his subjects in ways that feel organic rather than staged.
Sobekwa’s perspective has earned international recognition. As a nominee member of Magnum Photos, he is part of a prestigious community of photographers, yet he maintains the grounded approach that makes his work authentic. He photographs from within his world, giving viewers insight into lives, spaces, and experiences they might never otherwise encounter.
What makes Sobekwa especially important now is his ability to balance urgency with artistry. His images are not only socially and culturally relevant, they are visually compelling — the kind of work that draws attention, sparks conversation, and stays long after you’ve seen it.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa is a photographer to watch. His work is honest, direct, and impossible to ignore, offering a perspective that is both deeply personal and globally resonant.
Our Favorite Works by Lindokuhle Sobekwa
All Image credits: lindokuhle.sobekwa
“‘Jesus is coming’ is part of the LockDown series. I took this image during South Africa’s first lockdown, on Easter.” – Lindokuhle Sobekwa
“Ernest Cole was an intimate of black lives he knew its richness and its humiliation.” – Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Gogo Lucy Zwane in her garden. Johannesburg, Thokoza, South Africa. 2021. From the series Ezilalini (The Country).
“The Coles of Tomorrow is the essay I contributed to ‘The House of Story,’ a publication that brings together the work of four South African photographers we worked with, Candice Jensen and myself.” – Lindokuhle Sobekwa
“My mother reading a Bible, which for her is an escape tool from stress and pain. The Bible gives her a sense of hope that one day all will be good. Thokoza, Johannesburg, South Africa. 2015.” – Lindokuhle Sobekwa
“The Daleside project was a way to confront those feelings and to find a way into the community of Daleside. And once I was let into the community, it was not what I expected.”– Lindokuhle Sobekwa
“This work is from a project I did about the community of Daleside. It’s a place I had many unresolved issues with, as well as a deep curiosity about. It used to be a white-dominated neighbourhood, it is now a mixed community. When I first visited the place as a child my mother was employed as a domestic worker there.”
– Lindokuhle Sobekwa
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