Since Apartheid’s fall in 1994, South African photography has exploded from the grip of censorship onto the world stage. A key figure in this movement is Zwelethu Mthethwa, whose stunning portraits powerfully frame black South Africans as dignified and defiant, even under the duress of social and economic hardship. Working in urban and rural industrial landscapes, Mthethwa documents a range of aspects in South Africa—from domestic life and the environment to landscape and labor issues. His work challenges the conventions of both Western documentary work and African commercial studio photography, marking a transition away from the visually exotic and diseased—or “Afro-pessimism,” as curator Okwui Enwezor has referred to it—and employing a fresh approach marked by colour and collaboration.

Zwelethu Mthethwa is the artist’s long-awaited first comprehensive monograph, providing an overview of his work to-date and featuring the stunning portraits that have brought him international acclaim. The book, published by the Aperture Foundation in New York, is distributed by Thames and Hudson outside the United States.

ZWELETHU MTHETHWA (born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 1960) received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, a then “whites-only” university he entered under special ministerial consent. In 1989, he earned a master’s degree in imaging arts while on a Fulbright Scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York. Mthethwa has had over thirty-five international solo exhibitions in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa and Switzerland, and has been featured in numerous prominent group exhibitions, including the 2005 Venice Biennial; Prospect.1 New Orleans, 2008; and Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, which toured internationally.
He is represented internationally by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

ISOLDE BRIELMAIER (editor) is visiting assistant professor of art at Vassar College, and guest professor at Barnard College/Columbia University as well as an independent curator and writer.

OKWUI ENWEZOR (essay) is dean of academic affairs at San Francisco Art Institute, and the former artistic director of both Documenta XI and the second Johannesburg Biennale. He is a pioneering critic and curator.

Hardcover, 29.8 x 25.4 cm, 180 pages, 75 four-color images
ISBN 978-1-59711-113-3

BOOK LAUNCH Zwelethu Mthethwa
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