Untitled (The tree)

Tshepiso Mazibuko is a photographer based in Johannesburg. Before she was introduced to photography – via an initiative called Of Soul and Joy, which aimed to expose the students of Buhlebuzile Secondary School to the medium – her interest lay in journalism. Although she has switched from words to images as a means of expression, she remains true to her original ambition: she tells stories of people who live near her, documenting the township where she was born and still lives. On the other hand, she veers away from the mode of documentation, playing with light and focus to create evocative images that Sean O’Toole has described as ‘capable of recognising in the bare facts of human circumstance something close to poetry.’ Her sensitive approach to image-making and honest representation of real people make Mazibuko a successor to Santu Mofokeng and David Goldblatt.

Warren Editions made a photogravure with her for Edition S 2016, which comes from a body of work titled Gone and Here, which, like most of Mazibuko’s work, was shot in the township of Thokoza on the East Rand. For Zhané Warren to produce the photogravure, a transparent positive image containing the photograph was exposed to light-sensitive pigment gelatin tissue. After laminating, the gelatin tissue was transferred to a rosin-covered copperplate and etched in a series of acid baths to achieve the tonal range and details. The Gone and Here project contains figures, interiors and landscapes, and Mazibuko’s treatment of the subjects contains marked distinctions. In the images of figures and interiors, Mazibuko’s approach to light and focus is looser, allowing forms to blur and recede into shadow, which creates a sense of movement. The landscapes – such as seen with her photogravure – are crisp and have a depth of focus that allows for the depiction of apparent and specific detail – cars, power lines and people in the distance, individual rocks and dry blades of grass in the foreground. Mazibuko sets up a dynamic relationship between the people depicted and the environment in which they live.

Tshepiso Mazibuko was born in 1995 in Thokoza, Ekurhuleni, in South Africa. She completed her studies at the Market Photo Workshop and has participated in numerous local and international exhibitions. These include Free from my Happiness at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, accompanied by a photo book of the same name; and 80 Days of Summer: Stories of Identity at the Ghent International Photography Festival in Belgium. Her pictures were published in a Belgian newspaper, De Standaard, in 2015. She was selected for inclusion in the Addis Foto Fest 2016, for which she travelled to Ethiopia. In 2017, she participated in the Les Recontres d’Arles Photography Festival in France and was awarded a Tierney Fellowship. In 2018, she was awarded the Prince Claus Fund Award. 

On International Women’s Day 2020, PH Museum invited Firecracker‘s founder, Fiona Rogers, to select ten women photographers whose work is impacting and underline why we should follow and support them. Rogers selected Mazibuko as one of the ten. In 2021, she became one of the eight founding members of Umhlabathi Collective.

In 2024, she received the Public Award at the Discovery Award Louis Roederer Foundation and the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro Arles.