Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban, in 1972, and lives in Cape Town (South Africa). Muholi is a visual activist who endeavors to give greater visibility to the black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual community of her country and beyond. Although her perspective is highly radical and provocative, it is simultaneously filtered through a truly intense, lucid and profoundly tender gaze. She came into public awareness with her solo exhibition ‘Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture’ held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. The exhibition marked the end of her Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. After that, her work showing black lesbians in intimate moments became a subject of both private and public scrutiny from art historians, feminist and gender scholars.
Muholi chose to stay closer to her experiences by capturing her world and ‘people’ as she would unsurprisingly declare. The closeness Muholi shares with the people she portrays plays itself out in a way in which they appear comfortable in the intimacy of their environments. The pictures are conceptually provocative, playful, and outright confrontational. As photography remains a mode of expression dominated by men, Muholi’s images serve to claim a space for black female bodies from centuries of objectification. It is an exercise in ensuring that those rendered voiceless can begin to reclaim the (visual) culture that was historically denied to them.
“I always say to people that I’m an activist before I’m an artist. To me, you take a particular photo in order for other people to take action. So you become an agent for change in a way. I say that I am a visual activist because it’s important to me to go beyond just being a photographer. Because you know, that sounds so sexy and it’s a ‘profession’. I think to myself what’s the point of just taking a picture? What happens after that? I’m doing what I’m doing to make a statement and also to say to people: This is possible.”
About her 2010 project Faces and Phases, she said: “In the face of all the challenges our community encounters daily, I embarked on a journey of visual activism to ensure that there is black queer visibility. Faces and Phases is about our histories and the struggles that we face. Faces express the person, and Phases signify the transition from one stage of sexuality or gender expression and experience to another. Faces is also about the face-to-face confrontation between myself as the photographer/activist and the many lesbians, women and transmen I have interacted with from different places. Photographs in this series traverse spaces from Gauteng, Cape Town, Mafikeng and Botswana to Sweden.”
Muholi became a victim of a targeted attack in April 2012, when the flat she lives in with her partner was broken into and over twenty of her hard drives were stolen, effectively erasing the last five years of work that Muholi has been tirelessly building. Since only a few other things are missing it looks like the thieves have targeted the artist in her role as a queer activist.
