Back to Soil is a work of symbolic return, rootedness and recognition. Photographing three Black queer male musicians whose work is rooted in healing, ancestry and vulnerability, the portraits facilitate a different kind of seeing – away from the stark glare popularity, fame and its forms of fractured visibility. Stripped to skin and covered in clay, these images celebrate the transparency, openness and care evident in the practices of Desire Marea, Muneyi and Thuthuka Sibisi – all of whom resist and refuse the hyper – and toxically masculine, molding meaningful, magical and moving music as a practice of freedom and reflecting its sonic power.

Strong and soft, inviting yet layered, insistent and communal, Back to Soil is a recognition of their grounding in a foundation that is generational and a reality that moves beyond gendered expectations and societal demands, as they move from the soil and the soul – towards the truly healing and restorative.

Printed on lightweight fabric that echoes this sense of vulnerability, and the unweighted and unadorned, their fluidity, grace, imagination, care, power, tenderness and intensity are the life forces that inspire and produce these photographic portraits, as they mould themselves anew – in conversation with those who have walked this earth before, returning to the soil.