For more than two decades, Zanele Muholi has photographed people whom the archive tends to leave out. Since 9 October, that body of work has carried photography's most coveted distinction: the Hasselblad Award 2026, presented in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The prize, announced in March, comes with SEK 2,000,000, a gold medal and a major solo exhibition. It places Muholi, born in Umlazi in 1972, in a lineage that runs from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank to Nan Goldin and Carrie Mae Weems.

The exhibition opened on 10 October at the Hasselblad Center, inside the Gothenburg Museum of Art, and runs until 4 April 2027. It brings together photographs from six series. Among them are Only Half the Picture, an early record of lesbians who survived hate crimes; Faces & Phases, an ongoing portrait project begun in 2006; and Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), the series of self-portraits.

The show is curated by Louise Wolthers and Dragana Vujanović Östlind of the Hasselblad Foundation, with Lufuno Ramadwa of the Muholi Art Institute, the school Muholi runs to offer young people free photography training. The foundation's CEO, Kalle Sanner, describes a practice that combines photography with activism.

Muholi has framed the honour as collective. "We are awarded as a community," they said, dedicating the prize to their late mother and to mothers in general. The question the exhibition leaves open is a simple one: who gets to be seen, and on whose terms.