Zanele Muholi and the coming out of Black queer South African communities
The first retrospective in France devoted to renowned South African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi has opened in Paris. The exhibition brings together more than 200 works documenting the life of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual communities.
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“Photography for me is my life. Without photos, we can’t visualise the world in which we live,” Muholi says, emphasising that their mission is to shed light on people who are all too often “invisible” in South African society.
"I want to rewrite a Black queer and trans visual history … for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in South Africa and beyond," says the photographer, who uses the pronouns they/them.
The co-curator of the exhibition at the Maison européenne de la photographie (MEP), Victoria Aresheva, says this is the core of Muholi’s work.
“The artist presents themself as a visual activist, their work seeks to give visibility to the LGBTQIA+ community, under-represented in the media and in visual culture,” she told RFI’s Muriel Maalouf.
Born in 1972 in Umlazi, a township near Durban, South Africa, Muholi studied at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and Ryerson University in Toronto.
Many of the self-portraits deliberately accentuate their skin colour. “There is no make-up used in any of these photos,” says Muholi, explaining that they altered the contrast in post-production to obtain the effect.
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© {{ scope.credits }}Reclaiming Blackness
In exaggerating the darkness of their skin, the artist asserts a form of beauty. “I’m reclaiming my Blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other.”
“I am Black, therefore I cannot paint my face. That’s what we can see on social media; white people painting their faces black to imitate us and this is insulting. That’s why I can’t do it because I would be insulting myself,” they explain.
Upon closer inspection of the series, the eye is drawn to clothes pegs, scouring brushes, feather dusters and combs that at first look like elegant accessories.
For the photographer, it is a way of paying homage to their own mother who was a maid for a wealthy white family for 40 years. Her meagre salary supported eight members of Zanele's family.
“In the self-portraits dedicated to the mother, Muholi wears scouring brushes to represent an 'afro' hairdo. These are everyday, banal objects used as symbols of how hard Black African women work. In this post-colonial world, they are reduced to doing menial tasks, undervalued by society,” Aresheva explains.
The titles in the series are in isiZulu, Muholi’s native language and one of 11 official languages in South Africa. In this way, the artist takes ownership of and pride in their mother tongue.
Participants, not subjects
As well as reclaiming identity, Muholi's work opens the doors to a space where all marginalised communities can find their voices and show their faces without judgement.
Their series “Faces and Phases”, “Only Half the Picture”, “Being” and “Brave Beauties” encourage the viewer to think about the ways in which representation falls short for some communities.
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Behind Muholi’s work is a strong sense of collaboration and solidarity. They refer to the people in the photographs as active “participants” rather than “subjects”. Both work together to create the portrait’s setting, clothing and pose.
As the artist stresses in the exhibition catalogue: "It is important to mark, map and preserve our movements through visual histories for reference and posterity so that future generations will note that we were here."
Zanele Muholi is at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) from 1 February until 21 May 2023.
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