When Veuve Clicquot commissioned eight Magnum photographers to interpret the sun across five continents, South Africa’s Lindokuhle Sobekwa delivered a most provocative answer: photographing both daylight and reckoning. His response to the Maison’s Solaire challenge, Blooming in the Sun, now anchors Emotions of the Sun at Cape Town’s Youngblood Gallery through December 21st.
While his peers captured dawn’s promise and midday’s brilliance, Sobekwa went straight to judgment hour; that moment when African sunsets turn from gold to blood-orange and the day’s ledger closes. “Seeing the work here, in the light that raised me, gives it a different weight,” Sobekwa noted at the recent opening night alongside fellow photographers Salvadorian Cristina de Middel and Iranian Newsha Tavakolian.
Across Africa, sunsets are mirrors with burning skylines that ask one question: what did you build while the sun was watching? Sobekwa understood what Veuve’s audacious Yellow Label (Pantone 137c, naturally) was really demanding: emotional truth about light. And emotional truth lives in transitions; specifically, that threshold moment when you stand before another day’s end and measure your progress against an unforgiving orange tribunal. Sobekwa’s answer to Veuve’s solar dare? The sunset doesn’t lie.
His body of work transforms the gallery into something more profound than a photographic survey. While Steve McCurry delivers meditative Mount Fuji dawns and Trent Parke renders mythic Australian monumentality, Sobekwa’s sunset-focused vision reframes the entire Solaire premise. His travel photographs are emotional time capsules tracking the sun’s most honest hour across South African landscapes.
“The sun is our ultimate muse,” declares Thomas Mulliez, President of Veuve Clicquot, explaining why Cape Town’s relentless light made it the natural next chapter after Milan and New York. But Sobekwa’s genius lies in recognising that the muse’s most powerful moment comes at dusk; when potential gives way to proof, when sunrise promises meet sunset accounting.
The exhibition experience extends beyond Youngblood’s yellow-bathed walls. The Sun on Your Plate Café, curated by Seth Shezi, translates sunset palettes into flavour , while a bespoke gifting boutique offers Yellow Label collectibles which are tokens of earned celebration. Through December, intimate tours, La Grande Dame dinners and Bold Conversations continue the dialogue.
Tickets to Emotions of the Sun are R200. The exhibition is open daily from 10 am – 6 pm until 21 December 2025.
Vincent Zondo-Mhlanga works at the intersection of cultural storytelling and brand architecture. His career spans fashion, editorial, and creative direction, shaping narratives for luxury, style, consumer, and business brands with a discerning eye and strategic finesse.
Formerly Editor-at-Large (Johannesburg) for Business Day Wanted, with bylines in GQ, Glamour, and the Sunday Times, Zondo-Mhlanga has long held a front-row vantage point on fashion’s shifting landscape. Through @StyleGeist, his ongoing visual archive, he documents pivotal cultural moments in striking black-and-white portraits—from New York to Paris Fashion Week—capturing the rhythm of global style with an African gaze.
His guiding ethos is clear: culture is not something to be observed; it is something to be made.
