Long before he became a globally recognised name, Koto Bolofo’s fashion career began with a daring bluff at the offices of British Vogue.
In 1980s London, at Vogue House in Mayfair, a nervous young man is head-to-head with a receptionist who, in previous encounters, dismissed him as a courier. His voice thickens into a generic New York accent as he adjusts the silver Ford belt buckle cinching his tight black trousers.
Had she looked closer, she might have noticed that the self-styled American photographer en route to Paris was, in fact, a young South African immigrant improvising his way past the door.
“I didn’t even know where New York was,” Bolofo says over Teams, laughing. He remembers the swagger, the silver plastic briefcase, and the exaggerated watch-checking. “She bought it.”
In a sterile white office, Bolofo met with the art director, John Hind, and journalist Elizabeth Tilberis. Weeks later, the self-taught photographer was on his way to Tunisia for his first editorial shoot.
“I knew that my work was really good,” he says. “I believed in [it], but I wanted to go to a higher level. Next minute, I was running out of that office just like, joy, joy, joy. They booked me!”
That audacity would become a defining trait, not just in how Bolofo enters rooms but also in how he later reshapes them.
Born during the apartheid era to politically defiant parents, Bolofo’s early life was shaped by displacement. When he was four, his family fled South Africa, moving through Zambia, Kenya and Switzerland before eventually being granted asylum in the UK, where they settled on a council estate.
“You’re thinking, ‘Wow, I’m really lucky to be here,’” he recalls. “But then you get into the system, and there is racism. More racism.”
Like his father, whom he describes as “a very defiant man”, Bolofo channelled that instability into resolve.
“I [didn’t] want to go into a system [where], just because of the colour of my skin, I’ve got to be a bus driver or a ticket collector.”
He discovered photography during a foundation course and, much to his parents’ chagrin, spent the next two years ditching classes, roaming around London with the university’s only camera, photographing his friends. His status as a political refugee became fuel.
“I’d been barred from my own country. So [I said], you know what, f*** this, I have to work and better myself and become somebody.”
Being an outsider sharpened his instincts. By the time he entered London’s fashion industry — visually adventurous yet structurally rigid — in the 1980s, Bolofo knew how to read a room, how to assess limits, and how to quietly push them. Black photographers were still rare, and access was hard-won. His breakthrough unfolded gradually, built on discipline and self-belief.
Over the next five decades, Bolofo built a body of work spanning editorial, film, and long-term collaborations with publications such as Vogue Italia, Numéro France and Vanity Fair, alongside a series of photographic books.
He does not frame himself as a revolutionary. Instead he approaches the creation of photographs with a curiosity about movement and integration, working within systems while subtly expanding them.
He points to one of his best-known works from the “Harlem Basketball Ballet” series: a monochrome image of four young black ballet dancers suspended midair, basketballs poised as though about to slam dunk.
“You have to be a bit clever,” he explains. “White culture was [skewed towards] ballet, and basketball is a common sport within black culture, so I married those two. I always look for something that can harmonise our minds.” Excellence, he argues, keeps doors open much longer than outrage alone.
In recent years, institutions have begun reassessing archives that were once overlooked. Bolofo’s “Harlem Basketball Ballet” image, shot nearly 25 years ago, was exhibited again in Paris last year, proof that work once considered niche can have lasting resonance. He observes this shift with clarity rather than triumph. “Black, white, Asian or whatever, you’ve got to do the work.”
From his calculated bluff at Vogue to exhibitions in Paris, Bolofo’s career resists simplification. It’s a story of exile and reinvention, discipline and performance, integration and persistence. The boy inventing a New York accent became the man who understood that identity, like photography, is always an act of framing.
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.
Wanted
