Through Her Lens: How a New Generation of African Women Photographers Is Building the Infrastructure It Was Never Given
Unpublished Africa’s Women’s Month 2026 open call is one data point in a continent-wide structural shift. From LagosPhoto’s biennial evolution to Market Photo Workshop alumni networks, Bakashimika in Zambia, and the African Women in Photography database, the ecosystem that supports African women behind the camera has never been more developed — or more necessary.
On 4 February 2026, ART AFRICA Magazine published an open call on behalf of Unpublished Africa, a Harare-based platform for African visual storytellers, inviting African women photographers to submit work for its Women’s Month 2026 exhibition. The call is modest in scope: three to five images, an artist statement of up to 200 words, a bio, a headshot, and a response to the prompt “I’d be empowered if…” Deadline: 15 February.
If the call sounds familiar, that is because Unpublished Africa has run a version of it before. In March 2025, ten photographers from Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, Morocco, the DRC, Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Malawi exhibited in the platform’s “I’d Be Empowered If…” virtual exhibition, launched on International Women’s Day and curated around the same themes: economic empowerment, climate, cultural heritage, and the lived experience of women and their communities. That show was modest too. But its modesty is precisely what makes it significant.
Because the story here is not about a single open call or a single exhibition. It is about the infrastructure that now exists to turn a call like this into a stepping stone — from a virtual show hosted by a Zimbabwean platform, to a festival exhibition in Zambia, to a residency in Ethiopia, to a portfolio review in Lagos, to a gallery representation in Johannesburg or London. That pathway, which barely existed fifteen years ago, is now dense enough, geographically distributed enough, and professionally structured enough that an early-career African woman photographer can move through it and build a sustainable practice. The question for Art Residency Africa’s readers is how this infrastructure works, who built it, and where the opportunities sit.
The Call in Context: What Unpublished Africa Actually Does
Unpublished Africa, founded by Anesu Chikumba, operates at the intersection of media, community, and professional development for African visual storytellers. Based in Harare, the platform runs a newsletter (African Visual Storyteller), curated exhibitions, and a structured programme called the Creative Business Studio, which teaches photographers the business skills — collaboration, project management, creative entrepreneurship — that determine whether a photographic practice can sustain itself financially.
The Women’s Month call is one of several concurrent open calls the platform is running. On 3 February, ART AFRICA also published Unpublished Africa’s call for the Bakashimika International Photography Festival 2026 in Zambia, which specifically targets Creative Business Studio alumni and asks them to demonstrate how they are applying the skills gained through the programme. This pairing — a broad thematic call (Women’s Month) alongside a professional-development call (Bakashimika) — reveals the organisational logic. Unpublished Africa is not just exhibiting photographers; it is building a pipeline from open call to exhibition to festival to professional network.
The approach aligns the platform with the broader ecosystem of African photography infrastructure that has emerged since 2010, driven by festivals, workshops, and residency programmes that collectively function as a distributed art school, industry network, and exhibition circuit for a continent where formal photographic education remains unevenly distributed.
The Ecosystem: Festivals, Residencies, and the Architecture of a Career
To understand what a photographer selected through the Unpublished Africa call might do next, it helps to map the ecosystem she would enter. The infrastructure for African photography — and particularly for African women in photography — now operates across multiple interconnected layers.
Festivals as exhibition platforms and professional incubators. LagosPhoto, founded in 2010 by Azu Nwagbogu through the African Artists’ Foundation, has evolved from an annual festival into a biennial (its fifteenth edition, themed “Incarceration,” launched in 2025), attracting over 20,000 visitors and featuring photographers from Zanele Muholi to Samuel Fosso to Hassan Hajjaj. The festival includes residency programmes — previous editions have offered residencies in conjunction with Neue Schule für Fotographie in Berlin — as well as portfolio reviews, workshops, and large-scale outdoor installations that reclaim public space in Lagos. Addis Foto Fest, directed by the acclaimed Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh and produced by Desta for Africa, has operated biennially since 2010 from Addis Ababa, offering exhibitions, portfolio reviews, conferences, and film screenings. Les Rencontres de Bamako, the oldest photography biennial in Africa (founded 1994 in Mali), remains a cornerstone event. And the Bakashimika International Photography Festival in Zambia, which took its first international exhibition to the Xposure Photography Festival in Sharjah in February 2025, represents the newer generation of festivals emerging in Southern and East Africa.
Workshops and educational infrastructure. The Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, founded by David Goldblatt in 1989, remains the most important photographic training institution on the continent. Its alumni include Zanele Muholi, whose career trajectory — from the Workshop to international representation, the Venice Biennale, the TIME 100, and a Tate Modern retrospective — is the benchmark against which the current generation measures possibility. The Workshop’s intensive programme format has been replicated and adapted by institutions across the continent, including Nuku Studio, the Cap Prize mentorship programme, and Unpublished Africa’s own Creative Business Studio.
Databases and visibility platforms. African Women in Photography, a database and advocacy platform, catalogues women photographers across the continent by region and practice, providing curators, editors, and commissioning clients with a resource that counters the default visibility gap. The African Photojournalism Database (APJD), Women Photograph, and Black Women Photographers all serve overlapping functions — making African women lens-based practitioners findable and hirable by international publications, institutions, and NGOs that have historically relied on a narrow pool of Western photographers for African coverage.
Residencies and fellowships. Photography-specific residencies remain relatively scarce compared to visual arts residencies broadly, but the pathway is expanding. LagosPhoto’s residency programme, the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship (which placed South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa and others in New York), the Art Moves Africa mobility grant, and residencies at institutions like Villa Lena (Italy) and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul) have all hosted African women photographers. For Art Residency Africa’s directory, this represents a critical mapping opportunity: connecting the open-call pipeline to the residency pipeline so that photographers moving through platforms like Unpublished Africa can identify the next step in a progression from exhibition to immersive professional development.
Why Women, Why Now: The Numbers Behind the Visibility Gap
The emphasis on women in Unpublished Africa’s call is not ornamental. It responds to a structural imbalance in photographic representation that affects both who makes images and what images get made.
The problem operates at multiple levels simultaneously. At the production level, women photographers in Africa face the same barriers as women photographers globally — access to equipment, safety in the field, assignment bias from editors and commissioners — compounded by context-specific challenges around mobility, family expectation, and the economic precarity of freelance creative work in markets with limited editorial infrastructure. At the visibility level, international media coverage of Africa has historically been dominated by Western photographers, and within the smaller pool of African photographers who have achieved international visibility, men have been disproportionately represented. At the institutional level, museum collections, festival programmes, and gallery rosters are slowly diversifying, but the pipeline from emerging practice to institutional representation remains leaky.
The exhibition programmes that have emerged to address this gap — Unpublished Africa’s Women’s Month show, the “We (Are) Invested” campaign run jointly with Pin Africa in 2024, the African Women in Photography platform’s ongoing documentation work — operate not as charity but as infrastructure correction. They create exhibition records that photographers can cite in applications. They generate press coverage that raises visibility with commissioning editors. They build community networks that facilitate mentorship, referral, and collaboration. Each show, however modest in scale, adds a line to a CV, a relationship to a network, a data point to a database. Over time, these accumulate into careers.
Ecosystem Map
The Pan-African Photography Infrastructure for Women
Festivals, training, platforms, databases, and residencies — the nodes that connect an open call to a career
Festivals & Biennials
Exhibition platforms with portfolio reviews, residencies, and public programming
LagosPhoto Biennale
Lagos, Nigeria
Est. 2010. Now biennial. 20,000+ visitors. Includes residency with Neue Schule für Fotographie, Berlin. Dir: Azu Nwagbogu.
Festival + ResidencyAddis Foto Fest
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Est. 2010. Biennial. Exhibitions, portfolio reviews, conferences. Directed by photographer Aida Muluneh.
FestivalLes Rencontres de Bamako
Bamako, Mali
Est. 1994. Africa's oldest photography biennial. Pan-African and international programme.
BiennialBakashimika Festival
Lusaka, Zambia
Emerging Southern African festival. First international show at Xposure, Sharjah, 2025. Co-curated by Creative Business Studio alumni.
FestivalTraining & Professional Development
Formal education, business skills, and structured mentorship programmes
Market Photo Workshop
Johannesburg, South Africa
Est. 1989 by David Goldblatt. Continent's leading photo school. Alumni incl. Zanele Muholi. Intensive programme format widely replicated.
TrainingCreative Business Studio
Unpublished Africa, Harare
Business curriculum for photographers: project management, pricing, licensing, entrepreneurship. Alumni pipeline to Bakashimika exhibition.
Training + PipelinePlatforms, Databases & Visibility Networks
Making African women photographers findable, hirable, and citable
African Women in Photography
Online — Pan-African
Database cataloguing women photographers by region and practice. Resource for curators, editors, and commissioning clients.
DatabaseUnpublished Africa
Harare, Zimbabwe
Newsletter, open calls, virtual exhibitions, Creative Business Studio. Pipeline from submission to festival. Founded by Anesu Chikumba.
PlatformWomen Photograph
Global — incl. African members
Database of women and non-binary photojournalists. Connects photographers with editorial commissions and international publications.
DatabaseAfrican Photojournalism Database
Online — Pan-African
APJD. Searchable directory of African photojournalists. Used by international media for assignment sourcing.
DatabaseResidencies & Fellowships
Immersive development — the bridge from exhibition record to sustained practice
LagosPhoto Residency
Lagos + Berlin
In conjunction with Neue Schule für Fotographie. International exchange component alongside festival programming.
ResidencyAmpersand Foundation Fellowship
New York, USA
Six-week fellowship for Southern African artists. Photography alumni incl. Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Tshepiso Mabula.
FellowshipArt Moves Africa Grant
Pan-African mobility
Travel grants enabling African artists and photographers to attend festivals, residencies, and exhibitions across the continent.
Mobility GrantArt Residency Africa Directory
All 54 African countries
Comprehensive residency directory mapping photography-specific and cross-disciplinary opportunities across the continent. artresidencyafrica.com
DirectoryThe Career Pathway — From Open Call to Sustained Practice
The Unpublished Africa Model: What Platforms Can Teach Residencies
For Art Residency Africa’s constituency — residency operators, cultural programmers, and artists seeking residency opportunities across the continent — the Unpublished Africa model offers several lessons about how to design programmes that genuinely serve early-career African photographers rather than merely extracting content from them.
First, the integration of business skills with creative development. The Creative Business Studio’s curriculum — which teaches project management, collaboration, and creative entrepreneurship alongside photographic practice — reflects a recognition that the gap for most emerging African photographers is not primarily aesthetic but economic. They can take the pictures. What they lack is the infrastructure to sustain a practice: knowledge of pricing, licensing, rights management, grant writing, and the mechanics of moving from exhibition to publication to commercial assignment. Residency programmes that incorporate these elements alongside studio time and mentorship are more likely to produce practitioners who continue working after the residency ends.
Second, the use of open calls as both selection mechanism and community builder. Unpublished Africa’s calls are deliberately inclusive in their entry requirements — three to five images, a 200-word statement, a bio — which lowers the barrier for photographers who may not yet have portfolio websites, representation, or extensive exhibition histories. The call functions as a net that catches practitioners at an earlier stage than most festivals or residencies, then channels them into a structured programme that can accelerate their development. For residency operators, this suggests a model in which the open call is not a one-off selection process but the first stage of an ongoing relationship.
Third, the deliberate geographic distribution. Unpublished Africa’s 2025 exhibition included photographers from nine countries across West, East, Southern, and North Africa. Its 2026 programme connects to the Bakashimika festival in Zambia. This pan-African reach — enabled by digital infrastructure (Airtable for submissions, virtual exhibitions, newsletter distribution) — addresses one of the persistent challenges in African arts infrastructure: the concentration of opportunities in a handful of cities (Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Cape Town) while vast creative communities in francophone, lusophone, and smaller anglophone markets remain underserved.
Practical Information: The Call and What Comes After
What: Unpublished Africa Women’s Month 2026 Exhibition — open call for African women photographers.
Themes: Economic empowerment, women and climate, cultural heritage, personal or collective narratives reflecting the realities of women and their communities. Documentary or conceptual work accepted.
Requirements: 3–5 images with captions (format: Artist Name, Nationality, Title, Year), artist statement (up to 200 words), short bio, headshot, and response to the prompt “I’d be empowered if…”
Deadline: 15 February 2026
Submissions: Via Airtable — https://airtable.com/appf0GGiOOYqqSMzO/shrkUEE1utfvBujIj
Rights: All submitted work remains the property of the photographers.
Fee: None.
The Pathway Forward: Where Residencies Fit
The continent’s photography infrastructure is maturing along a trajectory that mirrors what happened in the visual arts more broadly over the past two decades — from isolated events to interconnected ecosystems. The photographer who submits to Unpublished Africa’s Women’s Month call this week is entering a pipeline that, if she navigates it well, can lead to a Bakashimika festival exhibition, a LagosPhoto portfolio review, an Addis Foto Fest screening, a Market Photo Workshop alumni network connection, a Women Photograph listing, and from there to editorial commissions, gallery attention, and the kind of sustained international visibility that was available to perhaps a dozen African women photographers a generation ago.
Art Residency Africa’s role in this ecosystem is to make the connections visible. Our directory maps residency and professional development opportunities across all 54 African countries, and the photography-specific layer of that map is expanding rapidly. As festivals like LagosPhoto and Bakashimika develop residency components, as platforms like Unpublished Africa formalise their pipeline from open call to professional development, and as new residency spaces open across East, West, and Southern Africa with photography-specific programming, the question for emerging practitioners shifts from “where are the opportunities?” to “in what sequence should I pursue them?”
That is a much better question to be asking. And the fact that an early-career African woman photographer can ask it at all — that she has enough options to require a strategy rather than a prayer — is the real story behind a modest open call with a 15 February deadline.
FAQ
1. What is the Unpublished Africa Women’s Month 2026 open call?
Unpublished Africa, a Harare-based platform for African visual storytellers founded by Anesu Chikumba, is inviting African women photographers to submit work for its Women’s Month 2026 exhibition. The call seeks photographic stories centring women’s lives, labour, creativity, and agency. Themes include economic empowerment, women and climate, cultural heritage, and personal or collective narratives. Submissions require 3–5 images with captions, an artist statement (up to 200 words), a bio, a headshot, and a response to the prompt “I’d be empowered if…” The deadline is 15 February 2026, submissions are via Airtable, there is no fee, and all work remains the property of the photographer.
2. What is Unpublished Africa and what does it do?
Unpublished Africa is a Zimbabwe-based platform committed to fostering the growth of African visual storytellers. It operates a newsletter (African Visual Storyteller), curates virtual and physical exhibitions, and runs the Creative Business Studio — a structured programme teaching photographers business skills including project management, collaboration, pricing, licensing, and creative entrepreneurship. The platform partners with festivals like Bakashimika in Zambia and has run annual Women’s Month exhibitions since at least 2024, in collaboration with organisations like Pin Africa. Its model integrates creative development with professional sustainability.
3. What photography festivals exist for African women photographers?
Key festivals include LagosPhoto (Nigeria, est. 2010, now biennial, 20,000+ visitors), Addis Foto Fest (Ethiopia, est. 2010, biennial, directed by Aida Muluneh), Les Rencontres de Bamako (Mali, est. 1994, Africa’s oldest photography biennial), Bakashimika International Photography Festival (Zambia, emerging Southern African festival), and Africa Foto Fair (Côte d’Ivoire, bridging East and West Africa). Many of these festivals include residency components, portfolio reviews, workshops, and mentorship programmes alongside their exhibition programmes.
4. Are there photography-specific residencies in Africa?
Photography-specific residencies are expanding across the continent. LagosPhoto has offered residencies in conjunction with Neue Schule für Fotographie in Berlin. The Ampersand Foundation Fellowship has placed African photographers in New York (including South African Lindokuhle Sobekwa). Art Moves Africa provides mobility grants for photographers working across the continent. Internationally, Villa Lena (Italy) and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul) have hosted African women photographers. Art Residency Africa’s directory maps these and other opportunities across all 54 African countries, including emerging photography-focused programmes.
5. What is Market Photo Workshop and why does it matter?
The Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa, was founded by photographer David Goldblatt in 1989 and remains the continent’s most important photographic training institution. Its intensive programme format has produced some of Africa’s most internationally recognised photographers, including Zanele Muholi, whose trajectory from the Workshop to the Venice Biennale, TIME 100, and Tate Modern retrospective established the benchmark for what is now possible for African women photographers. The Workshop’s model has influenced training programmes across the continent, including Nuku Studio and Unpublished Africa’s Creative Business Studio.
6. How can an emerging African woman photographer build a career pathway?
The current ecosystem supports a progression from open calls (like Unpublished Africa’s Women’s Month submission) to festival exhibitions (Bakashimika, LagosPhoto, Addis Foto Fest), portfolio reviews, database listings (African Women in Photography, Women Photograph, APJD), residency programmes, editorial commissions, and gallery representation. Key steps include building an exhibition record through accessible open calls, joining professional databases that increase visibility with commissioning editors, applying to festival portfolio reviews for mentorship and feedback, pursuing residencies for immersive development, and developing business skills through programmes like the Creative Business Studio. Art Residency Africa’s directory connects these opportunities across the continent.
AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHY INFRASTRUCTURE — KEY NODES
LagosPhoto Biennale — Lagos, Nigeria. Est. 2010. Africa’s largest photography festival. Now biennial. Includes residencies, portfolio reviews, workshops. Dir: Azu Nwagbogu.
Addis Foto Fest — Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Est. 2010. Biennial. Exhibitions, portfolio reviews, conferences, film screenings. Dir: Aida Muluneh.
Les Rencontres de Bamako — Bamako, Mali. Est. 1994. Africa’s oldest photography biennial. Pan-African and international programme.
Bakashimika Festival — Lusaka, Zambia. Emerging Southern African festival. First international exhibition at Xposure, Sharjah, 2025.
Market Photo Workshop — Johannesburg, South Africa. Est. 1989 by David Goldblatt. The continent’s leading photographic training institution. Alumni incl. Zanele Muholi.
Unpublished Africa — Harare, Zimbabwe. Platform for African visual storytellers. Creative Business Studio programme. Open calls, virtual exhibitions, newsletters.
African Women in Photography — Online database cataloguing women photographers across the continent by region and practice.
Africa Foto Fair — Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (from Addis Ababa origins, 2010). Bridges East and West African photography communities.
About Art Residency Africa
Art Residency Africa is the comprehensive directory of artist residency programmes across all 54 African countries. We connect artists, photographers, writers, and cultural practitioners with immersive professional development opportunities across the continent. A project of MoMAA | Stichting Royal African. Visit artresidencyafrica.com.