The Garden

In a series of photographs titled The Garden, the Zambian-born photographer Visule Kabunda explores the garden as a site of emotional reflection, resistance, and decolonial practice in contemporary South Africa.

Candice Jansen’s accompanying essay contextualising the images highlights the interiority of Visule Kabunda’s project. As she writes, “He moves between photographing public and private spaces, giving this…place its social extent and its personal depth...” This movement between the garden as physical space and as an interior landscape becomes especially clear in the project’s relationship to memory. As Jansen further notes: “At the heart of Visule’s project is another way into a memory of a garden.”

Joseph Ndukwu’s short story, inspired by the series of photographs, features a reticent widower who is asked by a priest to place flowers at the grave of his late wife. At this request, the widower wonders: “What flower could signal the end of one life and the beginning of another? Could he call any of this the beginning of a life? Could he call these past months living?”

If the essay lets the garden hold memory and renewal at once, the story shrinks that ground to one man—a widower deciding how much of the dead he can afford to keep. The question is no longer whether to remember, but how to go on remembering.

— Olaniyi Omiwale

More photographs by Visule Kabunda

The Garden is part of Tender Visions, our ongoing project supported with funding from the open society foundations. Tender Visions is a cross-disciplinary commissioning program for photographers and writers based on the African continent. Over the next one year, it will feature the work of thirteen photographers and twenty-six writers. This program will provide photographers with the opportunity to develop new, theme-based projects rooted in their local communities, while fostering collaborative engagements with writers who will produce creative and critical texts that contextualize the visual work. Our aim is to create space for deepened engagement with visual storytelling in Africa, and to bring new narratives to local and international audiences in insightful and thought-provoking ways. Read more about Tender Photos.