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Thabiso Sekgala grew up with his grandmother in a rural “homeland” South African settlement north of Pretoria. He subsequently worked in Johannesburg as a waiter and then as a photographer, but his creative imagination remained rooted in childhood memories of those territories established by the apartheid government to house black workers forcibly displaced from the city.
This portrait of Johanna Mthombeni, a teenage girl in those territories, was part of an acclaimed series that Sekgala made of the “born free” generation, children who grew up after the first democratic elections in 1994. The focus on the lampshade above his subject’s head is typical of Sekgala’s eye, which was drawn to the poignant and incongruous furnishings that spoke to the aspiration of the homeland families.
Sekgala knew this visual language well. His grandmother had worked for white families in Johannesburg and often brought home unwanted bits and pieces from those houses, “the leftovers from Misses and Baas”, as Sekgala called them. While other photographers in the new South Africa concentrated on poverty and violence, or the hopes of the urban “rainbow nation”, he was determined to find a nuanced register that captured some of the subtler lasting effects of apartheid. In 2013, he wrote that he was engaged in photographing both “presence and absence” in these lives, concentrating on “issues around land, peoples’ movement, identity and the notion of home”. When it was first shown, Sekgala’s work was a critical but not a commercial success. The photographer took his own life in 2014, aged 33, a few months after the death of his grandmother.
Here Is Elsewhere, an exhibition of Thabiso Sekgala’s work, runs at Hayward Gallery’s HENI project space from 28 August until 6 October
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