The Right To Play

The South African visual artist Lee-Ann Olwage’s (1986) project The Right to Play unfolds as both a poetic visual narrative and a political act. Through collaborative storytelling, Olwage challenges the structures that historically have limited girls’ freedom, education, and self-definition. Rather than portraying young girls as passive motives, she constructs images that centre their imagination and possibility. The project asks a simple but radical question: “What do girls dream of?” In doing so, it shifts the focus away from survival alone and towards the right to aspiration, play, and self-determination.

Olwage’s photographic practice is deeply rooted in participation and co-creation. Her images do not merely document reality; they are created together with the girls themselves, allowing them to actively shape how they are represented. This approach reflects her belief that photography can function as a celebratory and affirming space rather than a purely observational medium. Through vibrant staging, playful symbolism, and carefully constructed scenes, Olwage creates an alternative visual world where girls are temporarily freed from the social expectations that seek to confine them.

The project was developed in collaboration with Kakenya's Dream, an organisation working to end harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage through education. In this context, education becomes more than just school or formal learning; it becomes a way to gain independence and create change. Olwage visualizes this transformation not through statistics or direct reportage, but through imagination itself. The photographs portray futures that are often denied to girls within patriarchal structures, thereby making dreaming a political act.

This perspective can be connected to feminist art, which often challenges traditional ways of representing people by giving space to different voices and experiences. In Olwage’s work, the act of representation is central: the girls are not viewed through a lens of pity or exoticism, but through one of dignity, creativity, and empowerment. In a way, this, also distances itself from earlier colonial photographic traditions, where the local people often were portrayed as passive “others” and reduced to stereotypes created for a Western gaze. Instead, the images resist the passive narratives historically attached to women and girls in both art and media by emphasising subjectivity — the girls are shown as individuals with desires, ambitions, and control.

At the same time, The Right to Play shows how girls’ lives are shaped by many different factors, such as poverty, violence, and cultural expectations. Olwage focuses on how these challenges can limit girls’ access to education and freedom. But instead of only showing struggle and hardship, she creates images filled with play, imagination, and hope. In this way, the project becomes political because it shows that joy, creativity, and the ability to dream are powerful forms of resistance against systems that try to limit girls’ futures.

In the end, Olwage’s storytelling shows how photography can be more than just documentation and instead become a shared space where people feel seen and heard. The Right to Play is not only about the challenges the girls face, but also about the new possibilities that appear when they are free to imagine their own future. Through her photography, Olwage creates a hopeful and feminist vision of a world where girls are defined not by limits, but by their potential.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Lee-Ann Olwage is a visual storyteller from South Africa who uses collaborative storytelling to explore gender, identity and community as well as the relationship between humans and nature through intimate portraits and documentary projects.

She is interested in using the medium of photography as a mode of celebration and aims to create a space where people she collaborates with can play an active part in the creation of images, they feel tells their stories in a way that is affirming and celebratory.

Her work has been featured in National Geographic, The New York Times, Vogue, The British Journal of Photography, Foam magazine, Geo, The Guardian, Atmos, Vanity Fair, Dazed, Wired and IMA Magazine.

Notable awards include a World Press Photo Award, 2020, 2023 & 2024, Sony World Photography Awards, 2023, International Women in Photo Award Laurette 2023, Winner of This Is Gender, 2021, Pride Photo Award, 2021, CAP Prize winner, 2022.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT: 

HOMEPAGE: https://www.leeannolwage.com/

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/leeannolwage/