Zanele Muholi

In looking at Zanele Muholi's photographs from Faces and Phases, black and white portraits of black queer women and transmen from various townships in South Africa (2006-), I am reminded of bell hooks' The Oppositional Gaze. Hooks states, "The extent to which black women feel devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their looking relations. Those black women whose identities were constructed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most inclined to develop an oppositional gaze.” (page 127) Muholi began the project as a response to the discrimination and violence faced by the lesbian community in South Africa. She defines herself as a South African visual activist and says her work, “…Is a space for people to be visible, respected and recognized… and remembered most of all." (The Guardian).

From Faces and Phases

From Faces and Phases

From Faces and Phases

Muholi turns on its head what Berger characterized as the identity of a woman, “And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman,” (p.46) with the frank gaze of the surveyed onto the viewer. That gaze is open, vulnerable but also challenging. It demands the viewer look at the subject not as an object but as a person that is a whole human being that will not be denied. Berger says, “How a woman appears to a man determines how they will be treated.” (p.46) These portraits of strength in the face of brutality demand respect. South African lesbians are still being raped as a "corrective" measure. Some of the women Muholi photographed were subsequently killed for being lesbian or trans.

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, a township in South Africa. She co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual (activist) media. She is dedicated to representing black LGBTQI issues and holds photography workshops for young women in various townships. Muholi studied Photography in Johannesburg, and in 2009, completed an MFA at Ryerson University, Toronto. She has won many prestigious awards for her work. 

One of 365 portraits

Muholi’s book of monographs has just been published. Entitled, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, it features over ninety self-portraits. Each image uses material from Muholi’s everyday environment and is highly symbolic. Some are overtly political and many are a response to real life atrocities. Muholi says, "I'm reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other." So many images of black African women were taken by Western white photographers and especially in places like National Geographic were used exploitatively to sell magazines. The African women's stories if they were described at all were written by white western journalists as infotainment. All the people in the photographs were otherized. 

Muholi says, “The aim of my project is to speak about historical cases, confronting the politics of race and pigment in the photographic archive.” Her photographs have been called, “A manifesto of resistance.” In the post-production of her self-portraits Muholi has darkened her skin. This brings to mind Jean Kilbourne’s essay on advertising, “…The ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy. They tell us who we are and who we should be.” (p.121) I look at Muholi’s self-portraits as a rebuke of the persistent lightening of black skin in photographs of models and celebrities. Her self-portraits are in one part about the value judgment that we make on black skin and about showing us the the pain of surviving and triumphing over great cruelty. I am also reminded of the horrifying and degrading images of white people in black face (unbelievably, still a Christmas tradition in The Netherlands). Muholi reclaims black face and forces a reckoning in the minds of the white viewers. 

Zanele Muholi's artistic activism confronts a global history of racism, colonialism and homophobia. She is a daring and fearless artist working at a time of global authoritarianism and activity by violent groups of white supremacists. In her native country as well as many other countries including the US, her photographs force the viewers to confront the humanity of LGBTQI by not denying their existence. The fierceness of the gaze in all of her images provokes the question of what we are doing to help stop the violence of a community under siege in so many parts of the world. She says, “If given a chance to express ourselves, we have to do it consciously. And I’m not there to speak for the people, but to share and change the portrayal of black bodies in a space like London, or any other European space. It’s about time that we bring positive imagery of us in space where we are there, but hardly seen.” 

References

bell hoooks, The Oppositional Gaze

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Jean Kilbourne, Women in Advertising