Published by MACK in 2024, Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s I Carry Her Photo with Me is an 80-page photobook shaped by the disappearance and death of his sister, Ziyanda. Its point of departure is a damaged family portrait from which her face had been cut away—an image that makes absence both the book’s subject and its governing form. What begins within one family gradually opens onto the wider history of disappearance in South Africa.

Sobekwa remembers Ziyanda as private, rebellious and difficult to photograph. After vanishing for a decade, she returned home ill; by then he had become a photographer and understood that the family possessed no intact picture of her. He recalls once raising his camera when light fell across her face, only to lower it at her vehement refusal. She died soon afterward. The photograph he did not make becomes as consequential as the damaged one he found.

Rather than attempting to repair these gaps through a conventional documentary account, Sobekwa adopts the form of a scrapbook, combining photographs with handwritten notes. The approach keeps the work close to the provisional character of family memory: partial, revisited and marked by what cannot be recovered. At the same time, the personal narrative connects with his broader attention to fragmentation, poverty, and the enduring effects of apartheid and colonialism across South African society. A substantial essay by writer and scholar Neelika Jayawardane extends this movement between intimate loss and historical structure.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies not in claims of scarcity but in the precision with which subject and form are joined. Its compact sequence treats the family archive not as stable evidence, but as a field of erasure, refusal and longing. Sobekwa demonstrates how a photobook can hold a person whose image is largely absent, while asking what private disappearance reveals about a nation’s unresolved histories.