African photography is not having a moment. It has been making arguments for decades and most people just weren’t listening. What photographers Koto Bolofo and Andile Buka have in common is that they have always understood one simple thing: that an image is never neutral, that every decision made behind the camera, the lighting, the setting, who is in the frame and how, carries meaning.
What sets them apart is how differently they act on that understanding. One works through precision and timelessness; the other through environment, context and relation. Together, they make the case that African photography is not a single conversation but many and that the field is richer for it.
Both Bolofo and Buka presently have works on display at the Fashion_The Image exhibition on show at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and Inside Out Centre in Forest Town, Johannesburg. When reflecting on the exhibition, Ballen, a renowned photographer himself, put it plainly. “It was important to show a broad range of photographers, designers and ways of expressing fashion. This variety gives the public a much larger perspective.”
Bolofo was born in Lesotho in 1959 and fled apartheid South Africa with his family in 1963, arriving in London as political refugees. That history shaped the way he works. Rather than bearing witness to the world around him, he chose precision: images that resist the passage of time, that cannot be dismissed or ignored, that insist on their own authority.
Today, Koto Bolofo is one of the most recognised photographers working in fashion. His work has appeared in publications including Vogue and Numéro and he has collaborated with some of the world’s most prestigious fashion houses. Before he ever picked up a camera, he was a gymnast. He trained competitively with the British squad, and that early education in the body, in how weight shifts, how a pose holds, and what the precise moment of tension looks like never left him. It shaped the way he sees. His images have a choreographic quality: bodies caught at exactly the right instant, compositions that feel both natural and entirely controlled.
In Body Language, published in Numéro issue #200 in February 2019, he photographs model Lily McMenamy against an overcast sky. Both arms are folded back behind her head, hands cupped around her own throat, a position that recalls her background as a contortionist, the body folded with a control that looks effortless precisely because it is not. Dressed in Giorgio Armani, she is shot in black and white with no colour, no location and nothing to date the image. It simply stays present.
That timelessness is a deliberate strategy, not a stylistic default. For a black photographer navigating the fashion industry in 1980s London who had few doors open to him, making work that could not be positioned as marginal was a form of insistence. His precision is, in its own way, political.
During his 2026 walkabout at the Roger Ballen Centre, Bolofo spoke about his longstanding commitment to making images that outlast the moment they were made in, describing timelessness as something he had pursued since the beginning of his career, a defiance against pictures that get thrown in the bin with the magazine. Ballen echoes this: “Koto Bolofo’s work feels different because it seems to have a deeper meaning and an identity of its own. His images still belong within fashion photography, but they also move beyond it.”
This is equally clear in the Harlem Basketball Ballet series, also on view at the Roger Ballen Centre, where formally dressed young black men are caught mid-air on a Harlem street basketball court, basketballs raised overhead, the whole composition suspended between athletic release and balletic precision. Speaking about the series during his 2026 walkabout, Bolofo described it as “a silent cross-section; the basketballers will recognise their game, and the ballet people will recognise the spirit.” And these two amalgamate and come together.” Ballet and basketball, two movement cultures with entirely different histories, held in the same frame as equals.
Where Bolofo removes environmental markers to give the body a sense of permanence, Buka builds his images around the understanding that clothing is always worn somewhere. Place, atmosphere and the relationships between people carry as much meaning as the garments themselves.
Buka is self-taught. He grew up between Soweto and Orange Farm, and his introduction to photography was not a formal one. It was his father’s 35mm film camera, picked up during his matric year, and the instinct to point it at the people around him. What started as photographing friends became, over time, a professional practice. “The energy of Johannesburg forces you to get up and go hustle,” he told i-D magazine in 2016, “for me particularly, when it comes to photography, I’m driven and inspired by the city.” That relationship to place has never left his work.
In Ezokhetho 2022, a model in contemporary dress stands beside an old porcelain doll in an aged domestic interior, the tension between the two held deliberately, not resolved. Speaking to the Sunday Times in 2022, Buka said of the work: “I like this image because it’s really cinematic. It’s not really playing to how editorial images should look.” The world the subject inhabits is not incidental. It is part of the meaning.
This commitment to context reaches its fullest expression in the photograph produced for the Bubblegum Club Everyday Residency. Bubblegum Club is a Joburg-based publication built around presenting an alternative to dominant narratives about South African creative culture. The image features fashion designers Thebe Magugu and Wanda Lephoto, not models, but two of the architects of what South African fashion looks and feels like today. Magugu, winner of the 2019 LVMH Prize, was the first African designer to receive that recognition. Lephoto is a designer and co-founder of The Sartists, a Johannesburg creative collective of which Buka himself was also a member whose work challenged conventional narratives about African identity through fashion and visual storytelling. Professionally, both men are the people behind the image. Here, Buka places them in front of it.
During a guided tour at the Roger Ballen Centre, photographer Fiona Davhana singled this image out as one of her favourites. “The designers are usually the ones behind the camera,” she said, “and here they’re in front of it.” She also pointed to the fisheye lens Buka used, which places the viewer directly in the photographer’s position. Fashion photography’s conventional structure keeps the designer invisible, their work embodied by someone else. Here that structure is reversed, and the lens makes the viewer feel the full weight of it.
Bolofo works by controlling the frame completely, removing time and place until what remains is the body, the garment, and the light. Buka works by opening the frame up, bringing in environment, community, and relation until the garment is part of a world rather than lifted out of it. Both approaches are deliberate. Both are political in their own way. Bolofo captured this well during his 2026 walkabout, reflecting on the South African work around him: “When I stepped into this room, I thought, wow, the concepts, they’re modern. The talent is there. These ideas belong to Southern Africa.”
What they share is the conviction that an image can do more than sell a garment, that it can say something about identity, history and who has the right to take up space in a frame. Their methods are not in competition. The field is large enough for precision and situatedness, for timelessness and rootedness. Taken together, Bolofo and Buka show that contemporary African photography is not a single project but an ongoing conversation, one rich enough to contain both the sky above McMenamy and the red room where two designers finally step in front of the lens.
This article was produced through the Writer in Residency programme, a collaboration between the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography, Wanted, and the African Fashion Research Institute, made possible with the support of the National Arts Council.
