Photography at its best should make us stop, sit up and pay attention. If that’s the benchmark, then South African photographer Zanele Muholi’s images not only meet it, but surpass it — Muholi’s photographs bring you to a standstill, their breathtaking power reverberating in your bones long after you’ve seen them. Through arresting portraiture, Muholi interrogates the politics of race and the representation of black as well as the LGBTQIA+ communities in a mesmerising fashion that makes it astoundingly relevant today. Their work — Muholi uses the pronouns their/they and identifies queer — proclaims how a photograph is not a passive document, but a vital political weapon with the ability to intervene in accepted social codes and practices.
The immense potency and necessity of Muholi’s work is explored in their new monograph, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail The Dark Lioness, recently published by Aperture. The publication of this spellbinding photobook coincides with the opening of an exhibition of the same name at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta next week, with both book and exhibition presenting an incredible selection of over 70 self-portraits that confront the complexity of race and identity. Taken between 2014 and 2017, Somnyama Ngonyama investigates a range of tropes and themes including, domestic servitude, gender, sexual politics, xenophobia and violence, racism and homophobia, hinged on the charged representation of the black body.
In post-production, Muholi increased the images’ contrast in order to darken the complexion of the skin. The effect is stirring: the whites of the eyes pop and probe; the skin colour is emphasised and elevated — it is the focal point, the springboard for all the questions that Muholi poses. “I’m reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other,” explains Muholi. “My reality is that I do not mimic being black; it is my skin, and the experience of being black is deeply entrenched in me.” This experience that Muholi reveals through self-portraiture is not an easy one, rather the range of found objects and props employed in the photographs allude to a devastating history — for example, in one image Muholi wears a miner’s hat and goggles to commemorate the Marikana miners’ massacre in 2012 in South Africa; in another Muholi shyly peers out from the soft fuzz of a police cell blanket, or shrouds their face in white plastic wrapping in reference to how racial profiling reduces black people to waste material, or “trash” as Muholi says. In other photographs, Muholi employs an ethnographic style of photography that spotlights the almost fetishistic Western fascination with black bodies and exoticised depictions of African culture — intricate headdresses are fashioned from banal, household objects such as pegs and sponges, or alternatively, from items like sunglasses that play on derogatory Western tropes of black identity.
Interestingly, Somnyama Ngonyama coincides with another exhibition of Muholi’s work at Charleston in East Sussex. This exhibition entitled Faces and Phases presents an equally significant and spirited selection of monochromatic portraits that celebrate black lesbian and transgender identities. With electrifying series such as these it is easy to see why Muholi prefers “visual activist” over “artist” or “photographer” — Muholi’s work shakes viewers out of apathy, all the while encouraging members of marginalised communities to be seen, heard, and be recognised.
“Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail The Dark Lioness”, is now available from Aperture. The exhibition of the same name runs from 14 September until 8 December 2018 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta.
“Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases” opens on 8 September at Charleston and runs through to 6 January 2019.
All images by Zanele Muholi, courtesy of Aperture.