Lesotho-born Koto Bolofo fled apartheid South Africa with his family at a young age, settling in Great Britain in 1963. Now based in Paris, the globally renowned fashion and art photographer has shot campaigns for prestigious publications and luxury houses, published numerous photobooks and quietly become your favourite tastemaker’s favourite photographer.
In the 1980s, Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani challenged Bolofo to capture images reflecting his upbringing and culture. Alongside Andrew Dosunmu ― one of the few black stylists in the field at the time ― Bolofo returned to South Africa, took to the streets of Soweto, and street-cast its residents, blending local style with European pieces.
These photographs became Koto Bolofo’s renowned Soweto Series (1997), where Bolofo transformed the portrayal of township life. The series, now on show at the Fashion_The Image exhibition at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography, reflects his personality and the vibrant presence between the collaborators on set. Together, Bolofo and Dosunmu constructed an alternative visual representation of Soweto, one that was rarely seen in the dominant photographic archives.
This approach was particularly important as photography has historically been treated as an objective medium, despite its use to classify, control, and dehumanise black bodies in South Africa.
Under apartheid, photographs frequently reinforced racial hierarchy and state power, showing black life through a controlling gaze. Bolofo’s work disrupted this narrative by portraying Soweto not just as a site of suffering, but also as a site of style, play and community. His models are not passive objects before the lens but active participants in the making of the images, shifting the visual language from control to authorship and using the camera as a tool of resistance.
This shift can be understood through postcolonial critiques of the gaze. The colonial gaze is about more than just looking; it’s about power, about who has the right to define meaning and who is barred from representing themselves. Bolofo’s photographs challenged this hierarchy. The individuals in the pictures rejected the limited stereotypes often associated with township life and are presented as contemporary, self-aware and fashion-forward. The series expanded what could be seen and imagined about black life in South Africa.
Bolofo has described his process as one rooted in laughter, spontaneity, and projection. He deliberately avoided ‘clichéd’ documentary images of Soweto by casting on the streets, embracing local culture by interacting in the local language, and securing permission from participants before styling and photographing them.
“I like to have fun; I like to laugh,” Bolofo noted. “And along the way, I learnt early that the key was to project my own bubbly self onto somebody and hope that we’d meet in the middle to create a spontaneous picture.”
The final images were the product of an exchange between Bolofo, his camera, Dosunmu, his collaborators, and the social energy of Soweto itself. They show the township’s liveliness and character, centralising collective effervescence and shifting the camera from an instrument of control to a tool of self-representation.
This can be understood through what Bell Hooks calls the “oppositional gaze” — a way of seeing that opposes being controlled and reclaims authority in the act of representation. Bolofo and his models transcended the fixed roles of observer and observed to become coproducers of the images. The people in the photographs are not fixed as “the Other”; instead they actively construct themselves through dress, posture and performance. Their bodies become sites of creativity and refusal, capable of mocking authority, resisting stereotypes and asserting individuality without needing to declare politics in a direct or conventional way.
The series also revealed the wider role of style in post-apartheid South Africa. Dress becomes a language through which youth and communities negotiate identity, resist control and invent new forms of belonging. Through style, they respond to and contest the structures that confine them. The body becomes a space where meaning is created and shared.
What Bolofo achieved builds on a longer tradition of black photographers in publications like Drum, who documented black life and culture with dignity and style. What set him apart was his platform and connections — his ability to bring that visual language into the pages of Vogue Italia with the support of figures like Sozzani and Dosunmu, disrupting dominant narratives about black people in Soweto from within the fashion industry itself.
I am drawn to Bolofo’s work because it represents the familiar scenes and liveliness one would find in Soweto. These pictures are not static; they are like films that play within your mind. One photograph in particular stays with me, featuring two figures posing beside a vintage Peugeot in the streets of Soweto. The image feels like something lifted from my own family album. One woman, wearing a sparkling studded sleeveless dress with matching shoes, carries herself with a kind of effortless glamour. The other figure, a man sits casually on the car bonnet in a tailored jacket and patterned beanie, composed yet playful. Against the streets of Soweto their beauty stands out clearly, producing an image of the township that has always existed.
Through his Soweto Series, Bolofo created a visual archive that feels both personal and collective, as if memory, family history and township culture are meeting within the frame. Ultimately, the series shows that the camera is not a neutral tool but a contested site of power. Under apartheid, it served as a tool of control that reinforced systems of inequality. In Bolofo’s hands, it shifts to a medium of reclamation, allowing subjects to take part in their own representation, to express their identity, and to explore new possibilities for how black life can be perceived and understood.
Work by Bolofo is on display at Fashion_The Image, a photography exhibition by the Inside Out Foundation, curated by Wanted’s Sharon Armstrong and Aspasia Karras in collaboration with the African Fashion Research Institute, at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Joburg until May 30.
This writing was produced through the Writer-in-Residence programme made possible by the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and the Inside Out Centre for the Arts. This work was developed in collaboration with Wanted Online and the African Fashion Research Institute, with funding from the National Arts Council of South Africa.
