Wandering Nxumalo brings together traditional black-and-white photography and Overlanding as a countercultural gesture, an act of slowing down, observing, and embracing distance. Turning away from the relentless urgency of the city, Nxumalo embarks on a journey across Southern Africa’s natural landscapes, using travel as both a physical and conceptual framework for reflection and artistic inquiry.Inspired by Akinbode Akinbiyi’s meditation on the accelerated pace of image-making: “The increasing pace of everything... The quickening is demanding, leaving little time for reflection... Slowing down can be a blessing. 

It is a Zen moment in the aggressive onward rush of time and life.” Nxumalo adopts an analogue and deliberate approach to photography as a way to resist the immediacy of contemporary culture. Working with the Fuji GW690ii, a fully mechanical medium-format film camera, he re-engages the tactile processes of image-making: measuring light, adjusting aperture, and composing with intention. Each exposure becomes an act of patience and awareness, allowing the medium itself to dictate rhythm and flow.Nxumalo’s earlier body of work, rooted in the documentation of urban Black youth and countercultures, was deeply autobiographical, reflecting his own experiences as a young man, navigating Soweto and Johannesburg between the ages of 23 and 39. Wandering Nxumalo marks a turning point in this trajectory: a transition from the intensity of the city to the contemplative expanses of the natural landscape. 

The project seeks to familiarise the artist with nature, not as an attempt to reconnect, but as an act of redefinition, an effort to situate himself beyond the inherited identity of the city native.Having grown up surrounded by the density of Johannesburg rather than the vastness of grasslands and mountains, Nxumalo approaches the natural landscape as new terrain for both artistic and personal re-imagining. The Jeep Wrangler TJ serves as a symbolic and practical tool for this long term expedition, facilitating access, autonomy, and exploration.Through Overlanding, analogue photography, and audience engagement via YouTube and Instagram, Wandering Nxumalo becomes a living archive and a meditation on pace, presence, and authorship as the artist enters his forties and reimagines both his practice and his way of being in the world.