Zanele Muholi is a visual activist who uses photography as an archive of visibility, resistance, and memory, through portraits of the Black LGBTQIA+ community and theatrical self-portraits. This page traces the process by which the portrait becomes proof of a community’s existence and turns back on the power of the gaze.
Muholi does not confine the portrait to the representation of an individual. The point of this page is that they turned photography into an archive that registers the existence of a community into history and questions the desire to look.
This site does not display work images. Please see the official, museum, and publisher resources below.
Contents · Table of Contents
Making the portrait a community archive
In Faces and Phases, the subjects look frontally back at the camera, so that the work becomes at once an individual portrait and a record of a community that tends to be erased*2.
Turning the camera on oneself
In Somnyama Ngonyama, Muholi turns the camera on themselves, making clear a position that is at once participant and image-maker*1.
Questioning the desire to look
Stevenson’s statement explains a structure that, by bringing the dark face into focus, questions the viewer’s very desire to look*1.
Muholi’s importance lies in connecting the portrait to the visual history of Black queer and trans people, to the survival of a community, and to the violence of post-apartheid society*2.
Their reception at museums, photographic institutions, and publishers shows that Muholi’s work cannot be reduced to either activism or art alone*3.