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BIOGRAPHY

Bobson Studio was founded by Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall (1928 – 2003) in Durban, South Africa, in 1961. 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. Bobson 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 the clients belonged to the Ndwedwe people, a subgroup of the Zulu who live in the region known as Valley of a Thousand Hills, between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, the major cities of the KwaZulu-Natal province. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Bobson Studio began to offer color portraits, which best captured the vivid dress of the clients. 

Today, the art historical value of Bobson’s archive has become apparent. In the field of African studio photography, a topic of growing interest, Bobson is South Africa’s finest example, and is apparently the earliest African studio archive in color. The archive also forms a unique documentary record of the Ndwedwe beadwork in use at the time, and how African “tradition” coexisted with international, urban style. Such studios became a sites of affirmative self representation in the context of an oppressive Apartheid era.

Axis Gallery has represented and exhibited the Bobson Studio archive since 2000, and since Sukdeo Bobson Mohanlall’s tragic death in 2003, is the exclusive international representative of the estate. 

Bobson Sukhdeo Mohanlall’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, and featured in, “Dark Room: South African Photography and New Media 1950-Present”, Aug-Oct. 2010, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, Virginia, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, Jan. 23, 2011. In 2015 they were featured in “The Other Camera”, at the University of Michigan Institute for Humanities Gallery, Anne Arbor, Michigan, and “Contemporary Art/South Africa” at Yale University Art Gallery and in “Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion & Identity”. at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 2019.

Mohanlall’s work is in several private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Newark Museum, New Jersey and The Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove, United Kingdom. 

CV