Art form
African photography
Photography reached the African coast within a few years of its invention, and African photographers were running studios in coastal cities of West Africa by the late nineteenth century. The studio portraits of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé in Bamako, the documentary photographers who confronted apartheid in South Africa, and contemporary artists such as Zanele Muholi have made African photography one of the most admired bodies of work in the medium.
Updated 4 min read
The first African photographers
Photographers were working on the West African coast by the 1840s, and in the second half of the nineteenth century African photographers opened studios of their own in cities such as Freetown, Accra and Lagos. Families such as the Lutterodts, active along the Gold Coast, and photographers such as Neils Walwin Holm in Lagos made portraits for a growing urban middle class. Their pictures show Africans choosing how they wanted to be seen at a time when most photographs of Africa were taken by outsiders.
The great studios
After the Second World War, studio portraiture became a popular art across the continent:
- Seydou Keïta (c. 1921–2001) photographed Bamako between 1948 and 1962 against patterned backdrops, with props that let sitters perform modernity.
- Malick Sidibé (1935–2016) followed Bamako's young people to their parties in the 1960s and became the first photographer to win the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
- James Barnor (born 1929) ran the Ever Young studio in Accra in the 1950s, photographed for Drum magazine and worked in London during the 1960s.
- Sanlé Sory (born 1943) photographed the youth and music scene of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, from his Volta Photo studio.
- Samuel Fosso (born 1962), working in Bangui in the Central African Republic, began photographing himself in his studio as a teenager in the 1970s and has made self-portraiture in costume his life's work.
In Nigeria, J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere (1930–2014) spent decades photographing women's hairstyles — more than a thousand images, begun in 1968 — creating an archive that is at once anthropology and sculpture.
Photography against apartheid
In South Africa, Drum magazine, founded in 1951, gave Black photographers and writers a platform. Peter Magubane (1932–2024) documented the struggle against apartheid, including the 1976 Soweto uprising, and was imprisoned for his work. Ernest Cole (1940–1990) went into exile and published House of Bondage (1967), a devastating record of daily life under apartheid that was banned in South Africa. David Goldblatt (1930–2018) photographed the structures and landscapes of apartheid with patient precision, and Santu Mofokeng (1956–2020) turned to memory, belief and the land.
On 16 June 1976 Sam Nzima photographed the dying schoolboy Hector Pieterson in Soweto, an image that went around the world. In the early 1990s four young photographers known as the Bang-Bang Club — Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek, Greg Marinovich and João Silva — covered the township violence before the 1994 election. Further north, the Kenyan Mohamed Amin photographed and filmed East Africa's news for three decades; his 1984 footage of the famine in Ethiopia led to Live Aid. In Somalia in 1993 the 22-year-old Reuters photographer Dan Eldon, raised in Nairobi, was killed with three colleagues; his collage journals became a book and a film.
Contemporary photographers
Zanele Muholi (born 1972), a visual activist, documents and celebrates South Africa's Black LGBTQIA+ communities; their self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama is among the best-known photographic works of the century so far. Omar Victor Diop (born 1980, Senegal) restages historical portraits of Africans in the diaspora with himself as the sitter. Aida Muluneh (born 1974, Ethiopia) makes vivid, staged colour images and founded the Addis Foto Fest. Lebohang Kganye (born 1990, South Africa) works with her family's photographs. The Moroccan-French photographer Leila Alaoui (1982–2016) made a celebrated series of portraits, Les Marocains, and Yto Barrada (born 1971) photographed Tangier as a waiting room for Europe in A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project. In London, the self-taught, Nigerian-born Misan Harriman photographed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and that September became the first Black man to shoot a cover of British Vogue.
Festivals and collecting
The Rencontres de Bamako, the African biennale of photography founded in 1994, remains the key event; LagosPhoto and Addis Foto Fest, both founded in 2010, followed. See our guide to African art fairs and biennales. If you collect, learn the difference between vintage prints made at the time and later prints — how to buy African art explains why it matters.
Related
Photography is central to contemporary African art. Start with the profiles of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Browse our lists of African photographers and South African photographers. For staged, unsettling interiors, see Roger Ballen. For a young photographer whose tintype series reached the Venice Biennale in 2017, see Khadija Saye.
