Josie Borain’s unseen 1980s photographs go on show in Cape Town, revealing a private archive shaped alongside her fashion career.
Josie Borain is best known as one of South Africa’s defining fashion figures of the 1980s. A new exhibition at Ultraviolet Gallery shifts the focus away from the runway and onto a largely unseen photographic archive she developed during that same period.
Pretty Boy, opening on 19 February in Cape Town, brings together photographs Borain made between 1983 and 1989 while living in New York and Paris. Shot on black-and-white film, the images move between street scenes, private interiors, portraits and self-portraits, documenting a cultural moment from the position of someone usually seen rather than seeing.
At the time, Borain was immersed in the international fashion industry, moving through studios, shows and celebrity spaces. Alongside that public life, photography became a way of observing the world on her own terms. What began as visual diarisation slowly developed into a sustained practice, attentive to intimacy, vulnerability and the quieter psychological textures beneath spectacle.
The exhibition traces Borain’s movement between two worlds: the stylised environments of fashion and the street, including demonstrations, subcultures and fleeting encounters with strangers. Her photographs resist glamour. Instead, they privilege closeness and presence, whether she is photographing cultural figures, unknown passers-by or herself.
The title Pretty Boy speaks to the ambiguity that shaped Borain’s visibility. Her androgynous appearance made her distinctive in fashion, but also allowed her to move through cities without attracting attention. When photographing on the street, she deliberately stepped away from the heightened femininity of her professional life, blending into crowds and shifting from object to author.
As her practice deepened, Borain increasingly turned the camera outward, photographing artists, photographers and cultural figures who were more accustomed to seeing her as a subject than as a peer. The resulting images are unsentimental and psychologically alert, capturing moments of fatigue, vulnerability and unguarded presence.
Self-portraiture runs throughout the archive. In an industry that relentlessly framed her body for consumption, these images function as acts of self-determination, testing identity rather than fixing it, and exploring what it means to occupy both sides of the lens.
Co-curated with her daughter, Willow Borain, Pretty Boy introduces this body of work to the public for the first time. The intergenerational collaboration positions the archive not as a closed chapter, but as a living photographic legacy now entering public and private collections.
Pretty Boy runs from 19 February to 10 April 2026 at Ultraviolet Gallery.
