Zanele Muholi

A pioneering Zulu artist and activist, Zanele Muholi is a non-binary South African photographer who has received international acclaim for their striking portraits of the black South African LGBTI community taken over the past fifteen years.

Muholi was born in 1972 under apartheid in Umlazi, a township of Durban. The youngest of eight, their father died when they were young, and the family was raised by Muholi’s mother Bester, a domestic worker, is a source of inspiration and to whom many of their photographs pay homage to. Zanele Muholi worked as a hair stylist before moving to Johannesburg to study photography at the Market Photo Workshop, founded by renowned documentary photographer David Goldblatt, who became and remains an important mentor and champion of Muholi’s work. Influenced by the rise of social documentary photography of the 1990s, particularly Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus, Muholi said they admired these photographic portraits but ‘longed for something that was black’.

In the early 2000s Muholi started the Faces and Phases series, documenting and celebrating the black lesbian and transgender community with over 200 hundred portraits – Muholi represented South Africa in Venice in 2013 with that series. With demand increasing for Muholi’s work internationally and their profile rising, Muholi felt an urgency to turn the camera on themselves. Since 2012 has created iconic black and white self-portraits, including Zazi.

A compelling self-portrait shot in 2019, Zazi is a gelatin-silver photograph from the acclaimed series titled Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) in which the artist photographs themselves in locations around world, far from home, and uses the materials and elements of her surroundings as props or to create sculptural headdresses and costuming.

Zazi is a black and white self-portrait, the artist is look over their right shoulder, with a commanding and watchful gaze, holding a mirror in their left hand so that the profile of the artist is visible in the reflection. Zaziwas shot when the artist was in Boston, but printed in Durban, where the artist lives and works. Zazi – in isiZulu, the artist’s mother tongue means ‘to know oneself’ – in Swahili it means ‘wise’, and in Nigerian, ‘mirror of beauty’. For the artist, to know oneself is about self-representation - to see oneself and to be seen, to be reflected in the world, to be visible.

Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) photographic series, Muholi says, is about ‘reclaiming their blackness, reclaiming their personhood’. In doing so Muholi is also challenging and re-writing the history of the representation of black bodies in visual art. They say ‘My mission is to re-write a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence. Each and every person in the photos has a story to tell but many come from spaces in which most Black people never had that opportunity. If they had it at all, their voices were told by other people. Nobody can tell our story better than ourselves.’

Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art