There are artists whose work becomes recognisable because they spend a career perfecting the same image.
Sabelo Mlangeni has always inter-ested me for the opposite reason. He evolves. He moves from one subject to another, changes his geography, alters his formal language and keeps on looking.
I have written about Mlangeni before, particularly in relation to Ngiyobona Phambili, his exhibition of landscapes made during six years in Europe. The work was experimental, searching for a way to photograph European space from the position of a South African photographer while confronting the prejudice and estrangement of being there.
Now, back in Durban, we see him looking at a place he knows well but which he approaches with the curiosity of someone who has learnt that familiarity does not equate to expertise.
Honeymoon. The happily ever after?, now at KZNSA, is the strongest development of his practice I have encountered. It is expansive without being loose, formally adventurous without becoming mannered and deeply affectionate without collapsing into sentimentality. Crucially, it is brimming with black folk frolicking.
The project began, appropriately, with a joke. After Isivumelwano, his wedding documentary series, Mlangeni came to Durban and stayed in a hotel rather than with family. When people asked what he was doing, he said he was on his honeymoon. This eventually became a five-year relationship with Durban and the basis for this exhibition, which was first shown at blank pro-jects in Cape Town from 8 February to 29 March 2025.
I met Mlangeni in the KZNSA Gallery café and asked what it meant to show the work here.
“For me, the most important thing is seeing the work a few streets away from where it was made,” he told me. “We often make work in communities and different spaces and, as photographers, we don't always get the opportunity to return to those spaces and show the work there.
“Being able to present this work back in Durban is very special. When I look at the exhibition, it feels as though the work was made for this space and the space was made for the work.”
Mlangeni photographs Durban in all its incongruities. The warm Indian ocean is here but so are informal settlements, broken windows, damaged buildings, dirt and infrastructural neglect. The 2021 unrest and 2022 floods sit within the project alongside swimming, kissing, playing, rest and desire.
He turns our gaze towards the architectural heritage of South Beach, including buildings whose names, like Palm Beach and Sea Point, seem to carry imported coastal fantasies into a city that has its own complicated relationship with the idea of paradise.
Historically, the black body has been so insistently made to signify suffering. In colonial and apartheid visual cultures, black people appear within landscapes as labourers, servants, evidence of poverty or objects at the margins of white leisure. The beachfront was itself organised through racial segregation, making access to leisure a question of power and property.
To photograph black people now occupying that space as lovers, children, fathers, friends, swimmers and idlers is therefore by no means an exercise in naivete.
Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose's eBhish', exhibited at KZNSA from 21 January to 27 February 2022, pro-vides an important photographic lineage here. Nyawose's project confronted the historical absence of black leisure from the archive by constructing what he described as a contemporary archive of black oceanic presence. The project understood the beachfront not simply as a recreational site but as a space of memory, intimacy, spirituality and collective becoming. Its concern with the ‘‘finer happenings" of black seaside life was also a refusal of the colonial impulse to make blackness legible through fixed categories.
Mlangeni is doing something related but not identical. Where Nyawose enters the water to reconstitute the archive from within, Mlangeni moves through Durban's broader landscape, allowing the beach, the city, its architecture and its people to become one interdependent portrait. The result is not an archive of black leisure alone but an account of a city in which leisure, catastrophe, intimacy and neglect occupy the same lexicon.
This is perhaps why the exhibition feels so affectionate. Mlangeni clearly loves black folk. More specifically — dare I say it — he loves black men. The camera does not disguise that attraction. One sequence makes this severely obvious: a beautiful muscular man's full body gives way to a closer view, then to his back, then his toned abs where sweat drips down brown skin.
The triptych is neither merely documentary nor conventionally erotic. It is reverent.
This careful attention to the body extends into the exhibition. Mlangeni has more room here — and he uses it. Photographs are hung high and low; some are framed, others unframed; some overlap while others are given considerable distance.
The installation refuses the obedient grid in favour of something more bodily. Images come together, separate, interrupt one another. The exhibition does not tell us where to stand intellectually any more than the photographs tell their subjects how to stand physically.
The images move from a sharp crispness to a blurry haze. Mlangeni moves from sunlit bodies to grey sand to broken windows. A child sprawls across his father’s chest, three men recline together, a couple kiss by the sea, while others wade into the water or drift through the frame, alternately acknowledging the camera and ignoring it.
When Mlangeni returns to the beach after looking at the city’s deterioration, neither space cancels the other. Pleasure and precarity belong to the same Durban, photographed without reducing either to spectacle. Mlangeni explained: “There is also something important about the layers in the work. There is the surface: the light, the people, the moments of pleasure and celebration. But behind that surface there are other layers. You have to spend time with the photographs to enter those moments and understand what is happening.
“Even if someone doesn't necessarily read photographs in a formal way, I think there are images that will immediately draw their attention. All of these things are part of the community and part of what the work holds.”
The happily ever after remains unresolved, hence the sceptical question mark. Mlangeni is more interested in what happens when a city refuses an answer. During this trip, his car was stolen, recovered, stripped of parts and later, while photographing the ocean, he was beaten and robbed of his camera. His face was left scarred.
The same crime lord who ordered the attack eventually returned the camera and paid him R1 500 for the film after Mlangeni explained himself. “We don’t want to be part of your art,” he told the artist. Mlangeni plans to return to the scene of the crime, imagining this as where the next body of work begins: in a city that refuses clarity and keeps giving him reasons to return.