Zanele Muholi: Visual Activist, Not Photographer. The Distinction Is the Practice.
They document Black queer lives in South Africa and internationally with a sustained, collaborative, decades-long commitment that the art world calls fine art photography and that Muholi calls visual activism. The distinction is not semantic. It is the basis of the entire practice.
“The news report produces a statistic. The portrait produces a person. The distinction between photography and visual activism is not semantic. It is the difference between an image that serves the culture that looks at it and an image that serves the life it depicts. Muholi has spent twenty years on the second side of that distinction.”
Zanele Muholi insists on a specific title: visual activist, not photographer. This is not false modesty about technical skill — the photographs are formally extraordinary, the prints large, the compositional intelligence evident and sustained across twenty years of work. It is a political statement about the purpose of the practice. Photography produces images. Visual activism produces a record — a sustained, deliberate, collaborative account of lives that the dominant visual culture has either rendered invisible or represented in ways that serve the dominant culture’s interests rather than the lives themselves.
Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban, South Africa, in 1972, and began making photographs of Black lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa in the early 2000s, at a moment when the specific combination of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and poverty that characterised the lives they were documenting was producing specific and systematic violence. The corrective rape of Black lesbian women — a form of hate crime specific to the South African context — was documented in news reports; Muholi made portraits. The distinction is everything: the news report produces a statistic, the portrait produces a person.
The Faces and Phases series — which Muholi has been developing since 2006 and which now comprises several hundred portraits of Black lesbian and transgender individuals across South Africa and internationally — is the most sustained body of work in their practice. Each portrait is made with the full participation and agency of the subject, who chooses their presentation. The resulting images are specific and irreducible: each person is themselves in this photograph, and the accumulation of specificity across several hundred images is what produces the political meaning of the series.
The Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series, begun in 2012, turns the camera on Muholi themselves. The self-portraits use extremely high contrast in the darkroom printing process to emphasise the deep black of the skin, using visual extremity as a formal response to a history of visual representation that has consistently sought to lighten the representation of dark skin. The portraits are confrontational, beautiful, and historically knowing.
Muholi is a co-founder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), a non-profit support and advocacy organisation for Black lesbian women in South Africa. The visual activism and the organisational activism are continuous rather than parallel: the photographs serve the advocacy, the advocacy generates the permission and the trust that makes the photographs possible.
They have exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, and are in the permanent collections of major institutions globally. The monographs — Faces and Phases published by Steidl and Somnyama Ngonyama by Aperture — are the essential documents.
For the collector: Muholi is represented by Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. The secondary market has been active and is accelerating ahead of the institutional recognition.
The news report produces a statistic. The portrait produces a person. Muholi has spent twenty years on the second side of that distinction.
BY OONA CHANEL
