Photographer and painter · South Africa
Zwelethu Mthethwa
Zwelethu Mthethwa (born 1960) is a South African photographer and painter whose large colour portraits of people in their homes and workplaces were shown in major museums from the 1990s. In 2017 the Western Cape High Court convicted him of the 2013 murder of Nokuphila Kumalo, a 23-year-old sex worker, in Woodstock, Cape Town, and sentenced him to 18 years in prison.
Updated 2 min read
Zwelethu Mthethwa was born in Durban in 1960. He studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, and in the United States, on a Fulbright scholarship, took a master's degree in imaging arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989. From 1994 he taught photography and drawing at Michaelis, leaving in 1999 to work full time on his art. In the 1990s he became known for large colour photographs of people in informal settlements and rural areas, posed in their own homes — walls papered with magazine pages and packaging — and later of workers. Against the black-and-white documentary tradition of apartheid photography, the portraits insisted on colour, dignity and the choices people made about how they were seen. His work entered major collections and was shown internationally, including Inner Views at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2010; one source lists the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou and the Victoria and Albert Museum among the collections that hold it.
In April 2013 Nokuphila Kumalo, aged 23, was beaten and kicked to death on a road in Woodstock, Cape Town. CCTV footage recorded the attack, and prosecutors placed Mthethwa's car at the scene. He denied the charge and did not testify. In March 2017, after a trial of nearly four years, the Western Cape High Court found him guilty of murder, and in June 2017 sentenced him to 18 years in prison. The judge, Patricia Goliath, set the sentence above the 15-year minimum for murder with intent, rejecting arguments that prison would leave him unable to support relatives, and said his reputation as an artist earned him no special treatment.
The case, and the campaigning of sex workers' rights groups who followed it, raised hard questions in the art world about how it treated a celebrated artist accused of killing a poor woman.
How to look at the photographs now: the pictures themselves have not changed, but the question of who stands behind the camera and who stands in front of it cannot be put aside. Their strongest quality was the subjects' evident say in how they were seen, and that is the point to hold on to while reading the later history. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The collections above are those a single source names, and we have not confirmed what any of them currently shows. Ask each museum whether work is on view before you travel. See our list of South African artists.
