‘Fashion_The Image’ exhibition unpacks a system of meaning

Humans have always had a complicated relationship with appearances. Fashion can be understood as many things: aspiration, survival strategy and performance art — it can silently say a lot. For better or worse, the right shoe, the right jean, the right cocktail dress is not just a triviality, they can be coordinates in a social map. Fashion_The Image, an exhibition of fashion photographs, opening February 28 in Joburg, chooses to examine fashion photography not as decorative indulgence but as a system of meaning — the way a continent has negotiated how it wishes to be seen.

Staged across the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and the Inside Out Centre for the Arts, and presented by the Inside Out Foundation, the exhibition surveys five decades of African fashion imagery. That timeframe matters. Fifty years is long enough to chart not merely changing hemlines but shifting identities — from apartheid-era constraint to a contemporary global fluency that can sell a silhouette in Paris or in Sandton.

“Fashion photography has played a crucial role in how Africa has imagined itself and how it has been seen by the world.” — Roger Ballen

Curated by Sharon Armstrong, fashion director at Arena Holdings, in partnership with Aspasia Karras, Wanted magazine editor, and the African Fashion Research Institute, the show resists the condescension that often accompanies the phrase “African fashion”. It doesn’t position the continent as a colourful sidebar to a European narrative. Instead, it proposes Joburg as a generator of visual language — a place where aesthetic codes aren’t imported wholesale but are either tested, altered and exported, or generated here.

The exhibition’s premise is simple: to treat fashion photography seriously. That may sound redundant until you think about how often fashion images are dismissed as ephemera — a glossy distraction between ads or more “serious” editorial. But in Fashion_The Image, editorial spreads, campaign shoots, and fashion films are reframed as historical documents — evidence of how identity has been staged, consumed and reimagined.

As Roger Ballen observes, “Fashion photography has played a crucial role in how Africa has imagined itself and how it has been seen by the world”. His statement contains an uncomfortable implication: that imagination isn’t neutral. It’s curated, financed and circulated. It can liberate; and it can also distort.

The exhibition assembles photographers whose work has helped define this evolving self-image: Pieter Hugo with his unsettling composure; Nadine Ijewere’s recalibration of beauty; Nontsikelelo Veleko’s streetwise intimacy; Kristin-Lee Moolman’s collaborative futurism. Their work is shown alongside the designers they’ve collaborated with — Thebe Magugu, Rich Mnisi, Gert-Johan Coetzee and others — making explicit what’s often obscured: that fashion imagery is the product of negotiation. The garment makes one argument; the camera makes another.

A major element of the exhibition is the presentation of a focused body of work by Koto Bolofo. Bolofo’s career, forged in Lesotho and SA and polished in Paris, exemplifies the tension between origin and global validation. His images have shaped international fashion conversations, but their placement in this show suggests his connection with the continent over his success overseas. It’s a subtle recalibration of centre and margin.

Importantly, Fashion_The Image acknowledges the industry’s ecosystem. Every image is fully credited. Stylists, set designers, casting directors and technical crews are named. This insistence on attribution undermines the myth of the lone creator and replaces it with something more collective, team orientated and accurate: collaboration.

The exhibition’s physical layout reinforces its conceptual breadth. Still photography shares space with installations and a dedicated section for fashion films. At the Inside Out Centre, a new intervention titled Utopian Lands intersects with the semi-permanent exhibition End of the Game, linking fashion imagery to ecology and land. The suggestion isn’t subtle. Fabric doesn’t emerge from abstraction. It’s cultivated, extracted, processed. A photograph of a garment is also, in a sense, a photograph of labour and land.

Armstrong describes the images on display as works that “defined moments, launched careers and shaped how African fashion entered the world”. It’s a reminder that the stakes are commercial and cultural. These photographs didn’t merely appear in magazines; they altered careers. They facilitated entry into markets that have historically been out of bounds for people from Africa.

Conceived as an annual platform, the exhibition also includes a substantial public and education programme. The ambition here is pedagogical: to position photography as an accessible medium through which young people can develop visual literacy and interrogate the images they encounter in print, social media, historical texts. Like the images that have become iconic from Drum magazine, these fashion images have become a representation of agency and resistance to a prescribed narrative. This is part of what makes them so appealing and sexy.

What lingers after a walk through Fashion_The Image is not simply aesthetic pleasure. It’s the recognition that fashion photography operates at the intersection of commerce and self-definition — allowing us to own our own identities.

Joburg, with its appetite for reinvention, is the right setting. The city has always understood that dressing up and posing can be a kind of armour, a simultaneous foregrounding of aspiration and argument. The exhibition invites us to look at these images closely — to admire not only the fabric and the compositions, but the histories and ambitions stitched into them.

Fashion_The Image runs from February 28 to May30 at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg.