Lindokuhle Sobekwa Named Winner of 2025 Deutsche Börse Prize
139May 19, 2025
South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa, known for an experimental practice centering themes of family, myth and post-apartheid life, has won the prestigious £30,000 ($39,839) Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize for his 2024 photo bookI Carry Her Photo With Me, which explores the life and disappearance of his half-sister, Ziyanda, who vanished when Sobekwa was seven years old.
“The project is an exploration of a personal and familial narrative, of sibling relationships and of family dynamics. However, this personal story also informs us of the wider narrative of post-apartheid,” said Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation director Anne-Marie Beckmann in a statement.
Sobekwa was born in Katlehong, Johannesburg, in 1995, a year after the first democratic elections in South Africa. In 2012, he began photographing birthday parties and weddings while participating in the Of Soul and Joy Project, a local program aimed at teaching young people photography. The following year, he became a part-time photographer forLive Magazineand began his long-running personal project “Nyaope,” documenting use of the titular heroin-based drug among his peers. He joined Magnum Photos in 2018 and became a full-fledged member in 2022. He is represented by Goodman Gallery in Cape Town.
His winning project resembles a scrapbook in its inclusion of such ephemera as handwritten notes and family snapshots, placed along photos by Sobekwa. The volume is the photographer’s attempt to reconstruct the life of his half-sister in the eleven years she was absent from his life, having run away from home after accidentally chasing him into the street, where he was hit by a car. Sobekwa didn’t see her until 2013, when she was twenty-two; she refused to let him photograph her and died shortly after their reunion.
“Lindokuhle powerfully uses photography as a way for him and his family to speak about their past, loss, and memory, alongside the larger story and challenges of post-apartheid South Africa,’” said Deutsche Börse jury chair Shoair Mavlian, director of the Photographer’s Gallery, in a statement.
Sobekwa’s work will remain on display at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, alongside that of the three other artists shortlisted for the prize— Cristina De Middel, Rahim Fortune, and Tarrah Krajnak, each of whom received £5,000—through June 15.