For those who imagine that living in Soweto, Johannesburg, is to exist in a depressing, poverty-stricken, and crime-ridden ghetto, young black photographer Nontsikelelo (Lolo) Veleko has a message: “Yes, there is crime, but I live there and my friends and I have beautiful and amazing lives,” she says. “Being African is not just about being poor and sad and dying of AIDS as people seem to think. Being African is a lot of things . . . and we have to suck up all of it.”
One of those “things” for young Sowetans is a desire to make a statement to the world by showing just how beautiful and amazing they can look simply by following their own creativity and casting aside all the rules. It’s a sartorial process Veleko, who has an abiding interest in fashion, describes as “ ‘anti label’—you buy one thing, make another. It’s like play.” In Veleko’s “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder” (2004– ), an ongoing series of photographs of young people dressed in unique outfits, often with handmade elements, Veleko herself is the beholder of her title. The young men and women she stops and photographs on the street are the ones whose distinctive flair has caught her eye.
Veleko considers her photographs a collaborative process. Having given her permission to take photographs, her subjects are kept in touch with her. Veleko gives them photos and invites them to exhibition openings. In an earlier series of ongoing work that documented Soweto in a different way, Veleko photographed graffiti, then met the graffiti writers and followed the progress of those she thought had the best artistic style. The title of the series was “The Ones on Top Won’t Make It Stop” (2003– ), a reference to the efforts of the city council backed up by the police to prevent graffiti.
Born in Bodibe, North West Province, in 1977, and brought up in Cape Town, Veleko studied photography between 1999 and 2003 at the Market Photo Workshop in the Newtown precinct of Johannesburg, an initiative cofounded in 1988 by veteran photographer David Goldblatt. The workshop offers aspiring photographers—black or white—who can’t afford to go to university a chance to learn about photography.
Veleko’s first portraits were in black-and-white. But it was her brilliantly colored images of the street fashionistas of Soweto that caught the eye of international curator Okwui Enwezor and appeared in his show Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography at New York’s International Center for Photography in 2006.
More than making arresting and intriguing photographs of the cool, inventive costumes put together by a specific group of young South Africans, Veleko has brought into focus an essential, shared impulse among young people to show to the world a liberated, sharp, and confident identity free of all previous constraints.
Screamblacklips! Self Portrait series: Nono 2005
Digital print with pigment dyes on cotton paper
42 x 29.7 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Nontsikelelo Veleko
Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder series: Nonkululeko 2006
Pigment print on cotton rag paper
20.3 x 30.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Nontsikelelo Veleko
Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder series: Vuyelwa 2006
Pigment print on cotton rag paper
20.3 x 30.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Nontsikelelo Veleko
Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder series: Kepi in Newtown 2006
Pigment print on cotton rag paper
20.3 x 30.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Nontsikelelo Veleko
Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder series: Nono 2006
Digital print with pigment dyes on cotton paper
Paper size 42 x 29 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Nontsikelelo Veleko