The Garden
A Tender Visions Documentary Project by Visule Kabunda, with an essay by Candice Jansen and short story by Joseph Ndukwu
Zambian photographer Visule Kabunda explores the garden as a site of emotional reflection, resistance, and decolonial practice in contemporary South Africa. His photographs highlight how gardens foster belonging and care while critically engaging with the histories of colonialism, apartheid, and ongoing land injustice.
Back in his own garden, the priest’s words came back to him: You must take flowers to your wife’s grave, and he began to wander among the flowers, asking himself which of them he should take to her grave. He became flooded with the futility of the whole endeavour. 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? They felt like a dissolving, like a dissolving of the self into this landscape, into this garden where he stood, into the air and the trees and the sky, so that the vital forces of his life may be absorbed by the earth itself and pain may have no substantive place in his heart anymore, no place in which to sink its teeth, so that memory, his memory of her, pure and beautiful, would be all that was left. What flower could possibly dignify the acceptance of loss? What flower could equal the beauty of her life? He shouted a curse and pulled out a hibiscus plant from the ground in his anger. And then he stumbled a little further and sat down on the ground, among the marigolds, and began to weep, for how wretched he was feeling, for the futility of grief, and the permanence of pain. He wept a long time. Then he grew tired, and the tears stopped, and he raised his eyes above the flowers and watched the swallows sweeping past in the sunset.
Read “A Man in His Garden” by Joseph Omoh Ndukwu
The ‘Julia’s Garden’ photographs visualise such an interiority. The intimacy and tenderness with which Visule photographs freshly cut ‘bush lilies’ and potted anthuriums in her living room reveres her little garden. The close portraits of hands that cut, prune, carry and garden bear the weight of black tending. As open gestures, these portraits of hands that hold other photographs speak against the gestures made by the shadows of monumental men. These portraits signal us to look, not again, but inward, deeper into what we see. These photographs of family photographs that are kept in hands appear as nested memories, memories kept inside of other memories, kept inside a garden or Julia’s living room. ‘Amy in Julia’s Garden’ and ‘Julia’s Garden II’ double down on the flatness of the image, on time’s passing. At the heart of Visule’s project is another way into a memory of a garden.
Read “Beside(s) Gardens: On Photographs by Visule Kabunda” by Candice Jansen
The Garden is part of Tender Visions, our ongoing project supported with funding from the Open Society Foundations.
This is the fourth series in Tender Visions, a cross-disciplinary commissioning program for photographers and writers based on the African continent. From October 2025 until November 2026, we 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.
Our weekly newsletter features the work of African photographers and visual storytellers. Every Wednesday we send an image, a short caption, a statement by the photographer, and a link to an important resource for our community. On occasional Fridays, we send a roundup about other projects we are working on.