an essay by the African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI)DR ERICA DE GREEF, JOHANNESBURG, FEBRUARY 2026
Fashion images matter. They act as evidence, as sites of material, socio-political and
cultural knowledges. Paintings, and portraits in particular, precluded the words that
fill fashion textbooks as the site of culture, aesthetics and the material representations
of the day. Photographs now fill the textbook, their promise of truth eclipsing the
speed of the fashion sketch and portraiture’s need for realism. It is the fashion
photograph that represents history. Vernacular photographs, on the other hand, only
occasionally become the historical referent. Yet, we all know that the fashion
photograph presents a construct, an ideal, a speculative ‘no-place’ utopia that is only
a small part truth and a large part fiction. This half-lie becomes the archive. Perhaps,
not unlike all archives: they are constructs, fragments of truth. Only part of the event,
part of the story, part of the picture.
Fashion photographs carry the grammars of fashion through time, as flawed yet
aspirational representations of fashionable facts. These potentials – of future writing
and archival welcome – vested in the fashion image, mean that the fashion
photograph either quickly fades from view – as many do – or in retrospect, becomes
the iconic image, the canon of innovation, the marker of a style zeitgeist. The power
of the fashion image thus lies in its capacity to craft future histories1
.
And so, we ask, rather than dismiss fashion images as transient, that we pay closer
attention to the futures they bring into view and how they make visible, our
sensibilities, identities and imaginaries. The fashion photograph carves a powerful
pathway of possibilities, of what could be, of desire, identity, intimacy and pride. It is
an acknowledgement of the familial and familiar, yet each time presenting afrocentric
future visions anew.
The fashion photograph is also always a collective project. With the pioneering work
of Lesotho-born photographer Koto Bolofo, to the memorable, early 2000 images by
streetstyle photographer Nontsikelelo Veloko, and the enigmatic, groundbreaking
images of Tatenda Chidora, Aart Verrips, Kristin Lee Moolman and Andile Buka
amongst others, this exhibition aims to bring a spotlight to the collaborative poetics,
and politics, of the fashion photograph. It differs from the ethnographic record; it
borrows from the world of art; it takes its lessons from vernacular portraiture; yet, it
always seeks innovation. The fashion photograph becomes. It is the outcome of an expressive choreography – of designers, stylists, photographers, make-up artists, hairstylists, assistants, location scouts, agents, models, and often more – that this exhibition honours, without whom these future visions would elide.
1. De Perthuis, Karen. 2022. ‘The utopian “no-place” of the fashion photograph’ in Eds. Kollnitz, Andrea and Pecorari, Marco. Fashion, Performance, and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion. London. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. P145-160.
A Sense of Fashion: Beauty as Knowledge
I continue to think about beauty and its knowledges (Sharpe, 2019).
A pair of interlocked hands are nestled in a dark, chocolate brown mohair knit by
Pariah. The tender, pensive moment – of mother and child – is caught in the early
morning light. Alexa Singer’s portrait of Fidel offers an intimate whisper of tender
trust in an oft-divided world. Like yin and yang, model Nondumiso Beattie, wearing
a lightly textured, ivory gaberdine suit by Kluk CGDT, performs a poetic continuum
of brown and albino white in a play of light and shadow. Quiet activism belies this
gentle meditation, portraying resilient tenacity that speaks louder than words.
Photographer: Alexa Singer
Singer’s photograph pierces the space in its quiet resolve. It joins Steve Tanchel’s
timeless portrait of model Diandra Forrest wearing Suzaan Heyns in a diptych across
time. In a world filled with multimedia and moving images and audiovisuals, we are
invited to pause, to slow our viewing, to witness the fluidity of fashion. Slow looking
– like the slowing of the camera shutter – brings into view moments at times fragile,
at times striking. We become silent witnesses to encounters otherwise unseeable.
Photographer Nico Krijno’s ensemble of models wearing Viviers counter-balances the
poetry of movement in Aart Verrips’ take of models Goliath Gilbert and Phumlani
Mndebele wearing Uniform by designer Luke Radloff. Shelley Mokoena’s ascent in
the dark of night echoes the fleeting moment of Steve Tanchel’s poetic document of
Josh Habib wearing Laduma.
From movement to stillness, we become part of what Ariella Azouley describes as the
contract of photography.2 The choreography between bodies – of models,
photographers, stylists and designers – and the contract of our viewing. We are
socially contracted to look at these images of models, knowing that they know that
they will be looked at by us – this looking is its purpose. But to be seen, is different
to being looked at. In this exhibition we invite a looking beyond, a listening to the
images. Drawing on Tina Campt’s provocation to ‘attend to the photograph by way
of the unspoken relations that structure them’, we set them in relief – with each other
and across time – to juxtapose their sonic, haptic, historical and affective backgrounds
and foregrounds, through and against which we come to view them.3
Ross Garret’s striking photograph of model Aluad Deng Anei wearing Guillotine,
Micheal Oliver Love’s take on models against a clear blue, highveld sky wearing hats
by designer Crystal Birch, and model Thapelo Mofokeng wearing Viviers whose
image is partly refracted in public swimming pool waters, present moments in the hot
sun. Who are these individuals and how do we engage these gestures of closeness,
these proximities to lives lived? We are invited into a scene, a moment of being, an
intimacy in space. In Justin Dingwall’s dreamlike portrait of model Mariska Pretorious
wearing Clive Rundle, and Marguerite Oelofse’s painterly render of Kirsty Mckenzie
also wearing Clive Rundle, we enter worlds of surreal beauty and its other.
Writing over a century ago, Walter Benjamin frames the photograph: ‘with the close-
up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a
snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though
unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject [as] a different
nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye. The camera introduces
us to an unconscious optics’.4 Locating our relations to the symbolic proximities within
these photographs, invites the intimacies of being there, a social and cultural locus in
time and place.
In a profusion of intersecting colours and lines, models Kuany Atem and Temitope
Ajayi lean in towards each other. Twinned in matching black and white Thebe
Magugu three-piece ruched djellabas, trousers, and oversized headwraps, their sharp
Thebe Magugu stiletto pumps point outwards to the corners of the frame. Like
weapons on the patterned vinyl kitchen floor, they channel the vortex of smudgy hues
from the back wall. In this image, Nadine Ijewere pays homage to studio photographers such as ZJS Ndimande and Singarum Moodley, aka Kitty and others.
A retro melamine drop-side table proudly displays the lily of Saint Joseph in a fired
ceramic pot that echoes the two-tone hues of the room, a symbol of faith and family
but also of Sunday best. Unapologetic glamour swirls in an explosion of lines and the
undeniable presence of the feminine is coiled like a spring, readied for divine
intervention.
Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. London. Zone Books 3 Campt, Tina. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham and London. Duke University Press. 4 Benjamin, Walter. 1969 (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Ed. Hannah Arendt. Illuminations.
New York. Schocken Books.
Photographer: Nadine Ijewere
Beauty as witnessed in these moments of self-making – as a form of sovereign
representation – has long served as a site of cultural repair on the continent, an
everyday strategy of affirmation, a confrontational practice of visibility. Attending to
the frequencies of these photographic histories means being attuned to the
connections between what we see and how it resonates locally, and continentally, of
memories stored in suitcases and shoeboxes, on fridges and in framed family photos.
As Christina Sharpe notes, the image of beauty has worked across very diverse modes
of memory that includes photography.5 These cinematic sites of self-fashioning offer
black historiographies that transcend erasure. As a method, Sharpe asks, what might
beauty mean or do: what might it break open, rupture, make possible and impossible,
and how might we carry beauty’s knowledge with us to make new worlds?
5. Sharpe, Christina (2019) ‘Beauty is a Method’ in e-flux journal, Issue #105. https://www.e-
flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method
New realities of body and dress are conjured into existence and captured in studio,
as seen in Paul Shiakalis and Pieter Hugo’s minimalist portraits of Fikile Sokhulu, and
model Mitchell Akat wearing Thebe Magugu respectively with the metamorphosis of
fashion that comes into being, over and over again. Faith Johnson wearing Papama
Mtwisha, is shot by Kevin Mackintosh saturated in deep immersive red. In a play of
graphic lines, dynamic volume and liquid shapes, Brett Rubin’s take of Refiloe Seretlo
wearing Row-G and Aart Verrips’ images of Lebo Malope wearing Rich Mnisi, and
Nelson Maker wearing Chulaap, locate each of these material visualities in dreamlike
worlds, as symbiotic bodies and garments in space.
Grounded in a symbiosis of body, fashion and rocky landscape, is photographer
Ulrich Knoblauch’s striking portrait of modal Pivot A wearing the dreamy, long-
sleeved two-piece suit by Amanda Laird Cherry. Each new collection, each new
season, these fashionable looks are captured. It is in the fashion photograph that
impermanence survives. In Fashion_The Image, we find all the marks of becoming, of
remembering, of emergent visions, of surprising beauty, of radical intimacies, and of
decolonial possibilities.
Movers and Makers
Beauty is not a luxury, writes Saidiya Hartman, rather it is a way of creating possibility
in the space of enclosure.6 In this ensemble of images, we witness how the fashion
photograph has interrogated, interrupted, reimagined and transformed the norms
and ideals of gender, style and identity. Shot on location, the city of Johannesburg
frames these transformations with the work by trailblazer Nontsikelelo Veleko from
the Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder series, a project that she started in 2003, two
years before the New York blogger launched The Sartorialist. Veleko photographed
a new generation of post-apartheid designers Floyd Avenue, wearing Floyd Avenue,
and Sibu FDB, wearing FDB Human Store, and many others in the streets of
Newtown, Johannesburg. Capturing their style narratives too, was photographer
Chris Saunders whose ongoing image-making practice has centred on the histories
and contemporary style narratives of township-based street cultures.
Another architect in fashion photography in the city, Andile Buka paved the way for
a new generation of photographers with his seminal projects, such as The Sartists
Sport Series (2014) that recently featured in the groundbreaking Fashion Accounts in
Museum Africa exhibition (2024-2025). The iconic duo shot in this image, of rising
designers Thebe Magugu and Wanda Lephoto, wearing Thebe Magugu and Wanda
Lephoto in 2022, shifts the perspectives of formality and fame, creating a playful
illusion against an orb of glowing red.
6. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. London. Serpent’s Tail.
Aart Verrips’ candid portrait of Nkuley Masemola dressed in oversized Nhlanhla
Masemola occupies the page in a hexagram of folds, whilst Ray Manzana’s shot of
model Emmanuel Tjiya wearing a garment crafted with a pair of appliqued elephants
by Gert-Johan Coetzee is hosted by a soft, shadowy backdrop. Lethabo Machele
photographed model Phetogo Kgosierileng wearing Gift Kgosierileng in a synergy of
flight and light. Pitsi Tshipi wearing Tshipi Vintage is framed by Antonia Steyn against
a wall of the sepia-toned shadows of an urban apocalypse. Using a low angle, Lerato
Mbawu dressed Mr Mthethwa in BOYDE, and captured the Swanker, styled with a
vintage Valiant in front of a 1960s apartment block in one of Johannesburg’s many,
mid-century suburbs. This patchwork of past and present performs the aesthetics of
a city that simultaneously, and continuously returns to, and reinvents itself.
In a triptych of black and white, Tatenda Chidora’s photograph of model Constance
Moore for Mmuso Maxwell, Steve Tanchel’s photograph of Samuel L. Jackson
wearing Naked Ape, and Aart Verrips’ dynamic capture of Ephymol wearing Ephymol
point to the emergence of a different aesthesis, a return to Koto Bolofo’s ongoing
resonances in the work of fashion photography on the continent. In Carol Tulluch’s
words, they mark a return to the birth of cool, of black style as not only an indicator
of difference, but as a marker of an aesthetic of presence that imprints the sense of
self on society and culture.
7. That the fashion photograph is a legitimate place for discourse, one where otherness
is made visible, and bodies and style narratives that were traditionally excluded come
to matter, marks this anthology of images with a pulse of the new. Writing about her
mother’s set of neatly arranged dressmaking pins, Christina Sharpe points to
attentiveness whenever possible as a kind of aesthetic that escaped the violence of
erasure – even if it was only the perfect arrangement of pins.8 In these photographs,
we witness the cultural politics of attentiveness as the tool that reflects the dynamics
of future histories nurtured by the sartorial spirit in Johannesburg.
Utopian Land
Wearing a red, pink and orange splattered satin tailored jacket by designer Nao
Serati, model Desire Marea stands with hands gently closed – as if holding onto
something secret – thigh-deep in the centre of a ripple of cloudy, pale blue water.
The pool of water, a distorted ellipse, extends silently beyond his frame. A dark streak
of alchemical reactions encircles where water and land meet, where the scarred,
barren landscape of golden basalt and chipped rock rises. With an unwavering gaze,
Marea’s presence produces a single pulse, a heartbeat in the watering hole. His
reflection in the ridges of the ever-widening liquid stillness is totemic. His figure is
dwarfed by eco-violence – by the toxic remains of extraction. In a precarious apocalypse, where this touchpoint of life – water – no longer finds the trees, photographer Tatenda Chidora prompts a deep reckoning with our vulnerability.
7. Tulloch, Carol. 2016. The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora. London. Bloomsbury Academic.
Photographer: Tatenda Chidora
Born along a similar existential vein, the triptych of photographs by Merwelene Van
Der Merwe, Kevin Mackintosh and Ross Garrett each situate Black Coffee’s 2009
Mercedes-Benz award-winning collection in barren and desolate landscapes. The
siren red viscose knit ensembles, replete with pompom scarves and knitted beanies,
perform a cultural fusion, a layered hybridity, a kind of social dreaming. Precarity is
no longer a future dystopia. In the current crises of eco-violence and climate collapse,
we need dreams, we need hope. In urgent times, writes Bayo Akomalafe, we need to
slow down.
These photographer-designer collaborations raise the call for collective ecological,
cultural and environmental repair. Grounded in a phantasmagoria of ruins,
photographer Roger Ballen’s portraits featuring archival pieces from David Tlale worn
by model Sarie Pretorius, offer a psychological, semiotic rendering of contemporary
fashion. A stark reminder of the complex interplay between wearing the animal and
becoming animal. Equally disquieting, Steve Tanchel’s portrait of Kaone Kairo
wearing Thula Sindi harkens to a world where nature retaliates, where the stillness is
not silent, and where dreamscapes unsettle.
9. Akomolafe, Bayo. 2018. The Times Are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/the-times-are-urgent-
lets-slow-down
Achille Mbembe reminds us to attend to all that is happening amidst our return to the big questions of what constitutes human life; how we are to communicate between disciplines, between cultures, between human and non-human entities; and whether there is anything we hold dear in our ways of living that we might want to preserve, nurture and foster, while overcoming the existential.
10. Acknowledging our more-than-human interconnections in a moving and shifting world, Kevin
Mackintosh’s composition of Dennis Yeboah wearing skeletal-robotic print trousers by designer Chulaap, is a portend of shifting power. Yeboah holds aloft the magnificent head of a taxidermied zebra against a backdrop of stormy sky and passing clouds, thick rope knotted around his neck and waist. Whilst the fashion photograph is a static image, it is not a place of stasis. It is an open form, one that enables constant transformation, it is a place that holds the promise of a kind of
freedom in which new bodily forms, even new worlds can be made.
11. Luke Tannous offers lyrical relief with model Siza Khoale in a blue plastic couture gown by Gert-Johan Coetzee and Chris Saunders surprises us with musician Bongeziwe Mabandla wearing an oversized green plastic suit performing wild rhythmic gestures. The impact of fashion on the planet is under-scribed by these imperishable imposters of nature. Models wearing Thebe Magugu in Kristin-Lee Moolman’s tragi-poetic assemblage allude to desolate, film noir abandon, while two
images of hope are offered in royal blue. Michael Oliver Love’s photograph of Bethany De Waal wearing Gavin Rajah, and Themba Mokase’s surreal capture of Bianca Thandi – as if caught in an eclipse – wearing the BAM Collective, recall Bruce Lee’s famous adage ‘be like water’. These fashion images seek to make their way through the cracks. Be like water, both soft and powerful, as we enter our future worlds now.
10 Mbembe, A. (2019) “Future Knowledges and Their Implication for the Decolonisation Project”, in Jansen, J. (ed.)
Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
11 De Perthuis, K. 2022.