Photo: © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town
There’s a particular kind of recognition that doesn’t just “honour” an artist — it reframes the centre. This week, the Hasselblad Foundation named Zanele Muholi the 2026 Hasselblad Award laureate, placing one of contemporary photography’s most uncompromising voices inside the most official kind of institutional spotlight.
If you’ve followed Muholi’s work for even a moment, you’ll know the point has never been aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake. Muholi describes themself as a “visual activist” — and that isn’t branding, it’s structure. The practice is built as a long-term counter-archive of Black queer life, where portraiture becomes proof: I was here, we are here, we will be here. The images don’t ask for permission. They return the gaze, and they do it with formal precision — a command of composition, light, and greyscale/colour that turns visibility into something close to inevitability.
© Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town 
© Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town 
© Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town 
© Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town 
© Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town 
© Zanele Muholi. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York and Southern Guild, Cape Town
The scale of the award underlines just how serious the foundation is about that impact. Muholi receives SEK 2,000,000, plus a gold medal and a Hasselblad camera — the kind of prize package that functions as both validation and real material support.
But the real story isn’t the cheque, it’s what comes next: a major solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, opening 10 October 2026 and running through 4 April 2027. The week around it is being framed as a full cultural programme — with the formal award ceremony on 9 October and additional events tied to Hasselblad Award Week.
What the award effectively acknowledges is that Muholi’s work has been doing institutional labour for years without needing institutions to authorise it: documenting community, insisting on complexity, and dismantling the tired idea that “marginalised” narratives are somehow niche. In 2026, the Hasselblad Foundation is finally saying the quiet part out loud — that Muholi isn’t working at the edge of photography, but right at its future tense.