Forest Town’s quiet leafy streets in Johannesburg recently became the site of an exciting new kind of engagement with the African gaze. Fashion_The Image at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and the Inside Out Centre for the Arts opened on the 28th February 2026, delivering more than a mere gallery show. Curated by prominent Johannesburg-based fashion director and stylist, Sharon Armstrong, and renowned journalist and editor Aspasia Karras, the exhibition presents an exciting reclamation of Africa’s visual landscape seen through the lens of fashion photography.
Fashion_The Image was developed in partnership with the African Fashion Research Institute, and brings the medium of African fashion photography into focus as a tool for radical self-definition. The exhibition spans five decades with works by over forty photographers. It offers an ambitious survey of the evolution of fashion photography where expectations of the commercial label often attached to the fashion photograph are replaced by deeper questions of the practice as a pivotal historical document and a site for new African imaginaries.
A dual venue dialogue
The Roger Ballen Centre for Photography offers a dedicated space for the major part of the exhibition, but the works continue and integrate with the ongoing exhibition by the artist Roger Ballen, titled The End of the Game, in the Inside Out Centre. Working between the two spaces, the exhibition carries a dialogue across a wide range of genres, styles and approaches that amplifies the powerful visual storytelling within each image. Collaboration is centred and celebrated as a key component of the works on display. Each photograph, film and installation is fully credited, disrupting the myth of the photographer as the sole artistic genius. Instead, every stylist, hair and make-up artist, set designer, model and fashion designer is credited as co-author of the work. This move reframes the fashion photograph both as an artistic practice set within the gallery and as the outcome not of the individual creator but rather as the alchemy of sophisticated and collaborative labour.
Return of the prodigal
For the first time in South Africa, the exhibition includes a retrospective of one of the most significant fashion photographers to emerge from the continent, Lesotho-born, now Paris-based fashion photographer Koto Bolofo. The packed exhibition opening included a walkabout by the world-renowned Koto, whose pioneering and iconic images have shaped a lineage of fashion photography that is rooted in African authorship. Koto shared generously with stories of street casting and shooting an editorial for Italian Vogue in Soweto in 1997, to working with black ballet dancers in Harlem, and photographing swimwear in the middle of winter in Paris. His work combines international appeal with a grounded, afrocentric sensibility.
Researcher and assistant curator Ayabukwa Magocoba from the African Fashion Research Institute, says, “Through fashion photography and its oscillation between the ephemeral and the archival, Bolofo’s work became an ideal site to explore the nostalgic tension of reconstructing histories into personal and collective mythologies.”
Set within the walls of this exhibition, Koto’s work serves as a bridge connecting local heritage and global visual aesthetics. For many of us in attendance seeing Koto’s work and listening to his words, presented us with a pillar of African photography not as a foreign import coming from elsewhere, but rather as something familiar, as a site of return.
Photo by Koto Bolofo from his Soweto Series, 1997
From the streets to high editorial
In the exhibition featuring more than forty photographers, Nontsikelelo Veleko’s gritty street portraiture of post-apartheid born-free youths join the polished, surrealist worlds of Nico Krijno, the architectural precision of Aart Verrips, the political poetics of Nadine Ijewere, the film noire imagery of Kristin-Lee Moolman, and many more. Rather than dismiss fashion images as transient, we should pay close attention to the futures that they bring into view and how they make visible, afrocentric sensibilities, identities and imaginaries. Dr Erica de Greef fashion scholar and lecturer at the Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures department at the Wits School of Art writes, “The fashion photograph carves a powerful pathway of possibilities. It is an acknowledgement of the familial and familiar, yet each time it presents these visions, anew”.
Photo by Aart Verrips featuring model in Nhlanhla Masemola
The clothes are conversation
It would be amiss not to mention the fashion designers whose collaborations with the photographers are key in capturing these definitive moments in African fashion. From Rich Mnisi’s gender-fluid presentations to Chulaap’s culturally expressive collections, Viviers Studio’s poetic gestures, Nao Serati’s bold infusions, Thebe Magugu’s iconic pleats, Black Coffee’s monumental shapes, and so many more bold and brave fashion statements. This is a dialogue centred on identity. Fashion_The Image illustrates how South African creatives have used cloth, body and light to create worlds that resist stereotypes and futures that are unapologetically our own.
Photo by Tatenda Chidora featuring model wearing MmusoMaxwell
The legacy beyond the frame
What makes Fashion_The Image essential is its commitment to the future. This is evident in extensive public programming that includes masterclasses, walkabouts, a residency programme, workshops for school learners, book launches and more. Not content to serve merely as a retrospective of the last 50 years, the exhibition aims to actively engage a new generation of creatives underscoring the important role which emerging Johannesburg designers, photographers, stylists and more can play in shaping future African and global fashion narratives. The exhibition sets a precedent, ensuring that the fashion photograph transcends its place as mere advertisement. Fashion_The Image offers the photograph as manifesto, mirror and map of our myriad identities.
- Feature image by Aart Verrips for UNI FORM
- Be sure not to miss the exhibition, Fashion_The Image, which closes on 31 May 2026.
- For more information visit insideoutfoundation.co.za and @rogerballencentre
- The exhibition is proudly realised with the support of the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, the Presidential Employment Stimulus Fund, the National Arts Council, the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
