Purchased with funds from the Friends of Photography
An ardent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) “visual activist,” Muholi uses photography to document and challenge the discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTI community in South Africa. These portraits are part of Muholi’s ongoing series Faces and Phases in which Muholi presents positive images of South Africa’s LGBTI community in order to confront social assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices. “The photos leave you with the sense that these are people who simply want to be seen,” says one critic, “to have their life entered into the record.”
Muholi takes portraits in black and white as a reference to a long line of documentary photography, including Seydou Keita‘s studio portraits in Mali in the 1940s and 1950s as well as images by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Alec Soth, and others. Their subjects, like Muholi’s, look straight at the camera: openly, defiantly, shyly, proudly.
tags: identity, perception, power, subjectivity, survival
“The black face and its details become the focal point, forcing the viewer to question their desire to gaze at images of my black figure. By exaggerating the darkness of my skin tone, I’m reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other.”
-Zanele Muholi
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