Zanele Muholi, Lerato Dumse KwaThema Springs Johannesburg 2010

Hasselblad Award 2026

Zanele Muholi is the 2026 Hasselblad Award laureate. Muholi becomes the first Black queer South African to receive this honour, a significant prize in photography. The award recognises over two decades of work building a visual archive of Black LGBTQIA+ lives in South Africa and across the continent.

The jury consists of globally recognised photography experts and researchers appointed by the foundation's board.

The 2025 Hasselblad Jury members were:

Anna Planas (Jury Chair) – Artistic Director, Paris Photo, Paris
Johan Sjöström – Curator, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg
Oluremi C. Onabanjo – The Peter Schub Curator, Department of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Raquel Villar-Pérez – Independent researcher, writer, and curator; PhD candidate, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
Shoair Mavlian – Director, Photographers' Gallery, London
Tawanda Appiah – Curator, Skånes konstförening, Malmö

The ceremony will be held on 10 October 2026 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Muholi's major retrospective exhibition opens at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg from 10 October 2026 to 4 April 2027.

More about Zanele Muholi, the Hasselblad Award laureate 2026:

Born in 1972 in Umlazi, Durban, Zanele Muholi is a visual activist whose work documents and celebrates the queer communities in South Africa and beyond. Through photography, video, and installation, they have built an extraordinary archive that functions as both testimony and counter-history, asserting the dignity, complexity, and full humanity of communities the dominant image-world has too long rendered invisible.

Muholi's landmark series Faces and Phases, begun in 2006, comprises hundreds of black-and-white portraits of Black LGBTQIA+ individuals across South Africa and the diaspora. The ongoing project constitutes one of the most significant acts of visual documentation in contemporary photography, a living record of a community facing violence, discrimination, and erasure. Their self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), begun in 2012, uses the artist's own body to interrogate histories of representation, labour, and the politics of looking.

Muholi studied at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and completed an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. They are the founder of Muholi Art Institute and Inkanyiso, forums for queer and visual activist media, and have dedicated their practice not only to making images but to building platforms and communities for image-makers across the continent.

Their work is held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and the South African National Gallery (Cape Town). Major solo exhibitions include presentations at Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern, Gropius Bau (Berlin), and the 55th Venice Biennale.

The Hasselblad Award, now in its 46th year, carries a prize of SEK 2,000,000 (approximately R3.5 million), a gold medal, a Hasselblad camera, and a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Centre, Gothenburg.

David Goldblatt was the 2006 Hasselblad Award Laureate and the founder of Market Photo Workshop. Malik Sidibé was the first African to receive the award in 2003.

About the Hasselblad Award: The Hasselblad Award has been presented annually since 1980 by the Hasselblad Foundation and is widely regarded as the world’s largest and most prestigious award in photography.

22 April ‘25