Tender Visions
Tender Visions is a new cross-disciplinary commissioning program for photographers and writers based on the African continent, produced by Tender Photos and supported by funding from the Open Society Foundations. 13 photographers have been commissioned to produce new work within their communities, guided by predefined themes, and in collaboration with 26 writers, who are to write original creative or critical responses to the photographic projects. 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. View the portfolios, and read the essays and stories below.
"I don’t know if you ever heard of a case many years ago about a disappearance that happened on the Wits campus, a missing student called Michaella? She was my flatmate. The suspect in the case was Kuhle. He was the one Michaella was dating and the person who saw her last…"
In Nigeria, faith is shared, seen, and often expressed through clothing. This project explores how clothing and symbolic objects reflect religious identity and belief in Nigeria’s diverse faith communities. Through portraits, it investigates how fashion becomes both a personal expression and a communal language of faith shaping identity, creating belonging, and reinforcing shared convictions. It highlights the tension between fashion and faith, and examines how dress communicates conviction, reverence, and connection to the divine.
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.
Visule did not wait to be solicited. To collaborate with sitters he approaches them. He lingers with them. His camera often not visible. People would have to wait for him to share that he was a photographer. For most of our time together that morning in Arderne Gardens, Visule carried his cameras inside his bag. I had asked to observe him photograph and join a visit he would make to the Garden.
Visule Kabunda engages the garden as a dynamic site of emotional reflection, mutual care, and decolonial practice in post-apartheid South Africa. Grounded in the gardening practices of Black communities living in South Africa, this work examines how gardening offers important insights into how communities might ethically relate to land, memory, and one another.
I creep into the city at dusk. I have not been here for many years. Years or decades? I cannot tell, but when I see her, I will know how long it has been. Every city carries a distinct feeling like every human carries a unique scent and when I return to Casablanca it feels the same; old grandeur, stale smoke and the sense that everything is changing.
The most outstanding characteristic of Yasmine Hatimi’s photography is its compelling sense of place. Her work highlights Moroccan communities in a manner that is realist and unadorned yet full of tender experiments: shades, gazes, stark architecture. Leaping beyond her previous projects on Moroccan masculinity and culture, her new portfolio of images offers a unique interiority.
The ruins give way to renewal, to the promise of progress, to the shimmering face of a country in motion. I tell myself not to judge, only to witness. Yet questions echo within me, doubts gather in the silence. I should rejoice at this vision of growth, I should feel pride—but something falters, a dissonant note, a bitter taste I cannot ignore.
“I’m—I’m—here for the same reason as the others,” Lamin Momodu says. He averts his eyes. “We’re all here—to—to play Bubu music at America’s Got Talent. Our music came from the underworld.” He laughs and adjusts his suit, revealing sweat patches under his arms. “Well, that’s according to a historic myth. Centuries ago, someone had a dream, and in that dream, he saw a band like ours, playing horns. He was taught to play Bubu music in the underworld. It would be an honor to share it with the world.”
Kanu’s photographic practice asks: to what end do we make these pictures? The photographer’s proximity to the Temne, as one of them himself, is a powerful corrective gesture. It shifts the project from anthropological claims to collaborative memory-making. A photograph could be, in part, a gift.
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Tender Photos supports photographers and visual storytellers on the African continent.
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