Zanele Muholi wins the Hasselblad Award, one of photography's top honours
The South African visual activist is the 46th laureate, recognised for decades documenting black queer life.
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Johannesburg — South African visual activist Zanele Muholi has been named the 2026 Hasselblad Award laureate, one of the most significant prizes in world photography.
Muholi is the 46th recipient. The award, presented in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 9 October, comes with a gold medal, a Hasselblad camera and two million Swedish kronor, about R3.3 million.
"When this honour comes, I receive it on behalf of my community," Muholi said.
The work
A major solo exhibition, Zanele Muholi: Hasselblad Award 2026, runs until 4 April 2027. It draws on six bodies of work, including:
- Faces and Phases, a long-running portrait archive of black lesbian, queer and trans people, which Hasselblad calls a seminal body of contemporary photography;
- Only Half the Picture, first shown in 2002, which ties visual activism to the documentation of violence;
- Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), in which Muholi turns the camera on themself.
Across all of it, the work puts the people it depicts in control of how they are seen.
Source: Daily Maverick, 30 October 2026.
