Late last year South African photographer Francesco Mbele shot a story for Nataal, which captured the wonderful diversity of the country’s young Muslim crowd [Read it here]. But this time, he’s turned the camera around to become the subject as well as the artist. He describes his psychedelic submission as "some solitary time with my home video camcorder, self-portraits of the lonely." While the emerging Johannesburg-based talent’s work confronts those feelings that isolation elicits, it is anything but maudlin, with primary colours and acid tones dancing across his electrically charged collaged portraits.

See lockdown reflections from Yasmine Hatimi here.

Visit Francesco Mbele

Published on 11/05/2020