Deutsche

Börse

prize

review

–

Black

cowboys,

bonkers

rock-huggers

and

a

story

of

shocking

loss

The Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize is back, with four shortlisted artists, each nominated for a solo exhibition or book presented or published in the last year. It’s a quiet, solemn and laconic show ranging from lyrical, captivating portraits of Versace-clad Black cowboys in the American south to a woman hugging rocks.

Lindokuhle Sobekwa, the final artist in the show, would be a worthy winner for the £30,000 prize (which is announced in May). Sobekwa’s gripping project, I Carry Her Photo With Me, is reimagined in a slideshow, with a gorgeous musical score by Nduduzo Makhathini, and a constellation of images scattered in fragments across the walls, in keeping with the rawness of the original spiral-bound scrapbook.

It is a journey of shocking loss. When Sobekwa was seven, his sister Ziyanda (then 13) was chasing him when he was hit by a car and badly injured. Ziyanda then ran away and didn’t return home for nearly a decade. She was eventually found living in a hostel, but died soon after, aged 22. She would not allow Sobekwa to take her photograph, an absence that looms large.

In lo-fi images, he combs the misty, dilapidated, disenfranchised landscapes of the South African township complex where he grew up, once the site of a bloody taxi war. He sees glimpses of his late sister’s face in other young women he meets at the hostel. Slowly the sense of the family’s loss merges with the masses who have disappeared into the void of violence during (and since) apartheid. Diary entries are scribbled and urgent, the pencil pressed hard to the paper.

The pain of Sobekwa’s grief is penetrating; in one image, he catches his shadow cast over her grave. His photographs are often hazy, evanescent light fading like memories, the camera trying to clutch and fix the image before it is gone for ever.