In photography I am inspired by looking at human experience whether lived or imagined. Images capture our history, who we are, our presence and absence. My work is influenced by growing up in both rural and urban South Africa. The dualities of these both environments inform the stories I am telling through my photographs, by engaging issues around land, peoples’ movement, identity and the notion of home.
My focus is on landscape and portraiture, looking on how young people relate to their landscape and also finding their own identities. My work is the culmination of the exploration of memory, place and interrelated self-imagining.
With subtlety and sensitivity I consider how people develop place related identities out of so notorious past and the complex ways in which people develop nostalgia for histories that could be considered illegitimate. In my work I engage concepts of home, establish an understanding of what it means to call a place home and concurrently think beyond it. (Thabiso Sekgala)