Ending 27th Jul, 2021 19:32
Aspire X PLP | African Photography Auction 2021
31
Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall (South African 1928-2003)
Untitled # XLI
C-print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive
Artwork date: circa late 1960s - early 1970s
Signature details: accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Axis Gallery on behalf of the Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall Family Trust
Edition: number 2 from an edition of 10
C-print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive
Artwork date: circa late 1960s - early 1970s
Signature details: accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Axis Gallery on behalf of the Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall Family Trust
Edition: number 2 from an edition of 10
(1)
image size: 58 x 58 cm; sheet size: 59.5 x 59.5 cm unframed
Courtesy Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall Family Trust
Bobson Studio was founded in 1961 by Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall (1928 – 2003) in Durban, South Africa. The studio catered mainly to a Zulu clientele, who posed in their own beadwork and costumes for formal portraits that were also made into postcards, which could be sent to distant relatives and friends. Mohanlall used two cameras during this time, a Yashica Matt 120mm and a Rolliflex 120mm. The studio became the city’s most famous portrait studio and attracted clients countrywide, many of them from the broader KwaZulu-Natal region. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Bobson Studio began to offer colour portraits, which best captured the vivid dress of the clients.
The Bobson Studio archive has immense social-historical value. In the field of African studio photography, this is one of South Africa’s finest examples and one of the earliest African studio archives in colour. The archive also forms a unique documentary record of the periurban beadwork in use at the time, and how African “tradition” coexisted with international, urban style. Such studios became sites of affirmative self-representation in the context of an oppressive apartheid era.
Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall’s photographs have been exhibited widely, including Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion & Identity, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2019); Contemporary Art/South Africa, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (2014); Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall, Axis Gallery, New York (2014); The Other Camera, University of Michigan Institute for Humanities Gallery, Anne Arbor (2014); Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950, Virginia Museum of Arts, Richmond (2010); In the Studio: Portrait Photographs from Africa, Newark Museum (2004); and Towards-Transit: new visual languages in South Africa, Serge Ziegler Galerie, Zürich (1999). His work has been published in, amongst others, Tamar Garb’s edited volume Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (Steidl, 2011).
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Auction: Aspire X PLP | African Photography Auction 2021, ending 27th Jul, 2021
The sale, presented in partnership with the Photography Legacy Project (PLP) was the largest collection of African photography ever to come to auction.
Notable inclusions were works by Zimbabwean photographer Tamary Kudita and young award-winning woman photographer, Lee-Ann Olwage who collaborated with Belinda Qaqamba Kafassie. Emerging photographers like Kongo Astronauts collective (DRC) and the documentary imagery of Etinosa Yvonne (Nigeria) added depth and diversity, while the older generation of established practitioners like David Goldblatt, Alf Kumalo and Ernest Cole also featured.
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