An image from the Lockdown series that won the 2023 FNB Art Prize.
Images courtesy Lindokuhle Sobekwa.
The winner of the prestigious FNB Art Prize documents township life in lockdown and rural life in a former homeland.
An abandoned gold mine in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mark Lewis/Wake Up, This Is Joburg
From butchers to hawkers, and shelters to miners, this book reveals the informal economy and texture of the city.
Men wait for at a railway station for transport to a mine.
Ernest Cole/© Ernest Cole Family Trust/Courtesy Wits Historical Papers/Photography Legacy Project
Cole was a master of portraying the violence of apartheid through scenes of everyday life.
Mike Mzileni at home in 2018.
Screenshot City Press/News24 Video
‘A camera is more powerful than an AK47,’ said the veteran photojournalist, who was also famous for his jazz photos.
Jürgen Schadeberg in 1955 with trainee photographers at Drum, Peter Magubane, left, and Bob Gosani. Both became well-known photographers.
© Jürgen Schadeberg
The gift of his images lies in their depiction of the social worlds that apartheid sought to destroy, but that live on through the photographs.
Buddhist Retreat, near Ixopo (2003)
Santu Mofokeng/Santu Mofokeng Foundation
No South African photographer leaves a more substantial legacy than Santu Mofokeng. He was adept at mapping interior worlds through haunting images of black life and, above all, his landscapes.
Graeme Williams’s photograph he took in Thokoza township, near Johannesburg, in 1991. Police watch an ANC rally.
Graeme Williams
Acknowledging the source of the images would amplify rather than diminish the power of Hank Willis Thomas’s political art.
One of David Goldblatt’s iconic photographs.
David Goldblatt
It was only in the late 1990s, as the world became more interested in South African photographers’ work, that Goldblatt’s work was identified as extraordinary.
A farmer’s son with his nursemaid, Heimweeberg, Nietverdiend, Western Transvaal 1964.
David Goldblatt
Photographer David Goldblatt’s presence through his photographs will always be with us.