I found out about Zanele Muholi from the Spring 2015 issue of Aperture, "Queer," and was instantly blown away by her images, which both recall a tradition of African photography and vaults it forward into a progressive future.
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| Left: Muholi, Lesedi Modise, Mafikeng, North West, 2010 Right: Keita, Portrait of a Woman, 1950s-1960s |
Her project, Faces and Phases, is comprised of black lesbians in South Africa imaged against often patterned backgrounds. If this seems familiar, it's because it strongly recalls the stunning photographs of Malian photographer, Seydou Keita. Where Keitou's photographs interacted highly with the pictorial traditions of the time, Muholi's images have a deeper activist role to play. She insists on the term "visual activist", saying,
"If I were to reduce myself to the label 'visual artist,' it would mean that what I'm doing is just for play, that our identities as black female beings who are queer or are lesbian, is just art. Art needs to be political - or let me say that my art is political. It's not for show. It's not for play."
(Aperture, Spring 2015, p.64)
Be still my heart. Too often it is easy to forget that art is not just a luxury or esoteric field - it is a language of struggle, violence, joy and celebration. As much as it is made, it makes us, changing us and the world around us.
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| Muholi, from her Faces and Phases series |
I find Muholi's use of language surrounding her photographic process particularly interesting. She refuses to use the term "subject," as she links it to the word, subjugation. In my Art History training, I have always thought of "subject" as the preferable position, the privileged position, as opposed to "object." Especially as a feminist, subjecthood has always been the pinnacle to me. So it was interesting to hear from her that this word might not be as paramount as it seems, that the position of subject, in the eye of the Western camera may still be a place fraught with prejudice and difficulty. Muholi prefers the term, "participant," (Aperture, Spring 2015, p.63) because it gives the woman in front of the camera mor agency, activity and ability to consent. It radically changes how we traditionally think of the power dynamics involved in the photographic process, which I find exhilarating and especially appropriate for an activist project fighting heteronormative standards.
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| Left: Muholi, Teekay Khumalo, B B Section, Umlazi, DurbanI, 2012 Right: Muholi, Bakhambile Skhosana, Natalspruit, 2010 |
Muholi ends her fabulous interview by encouraging "young black female photographers, or females in any space, to document their own herstories." (Aperture, Spring 2015, p.64) Her photography is not only actvist in the revolutionary way it shows black queer women in South Africa in a positive, beautiful light, but also in the way it may encourage other women to make their voices heard. Something this blog, this blogger, is all about. I will end with her last statement, because you can't say it any better than she does.
"There are many stories that still need to be told by women, either through text or visually. So I'd like to say, Let's do it, let's do it together in ways that we never thought were possible, penetrating those impossible spaces like the galleries, like the museums around the globe."
(Aperture, Spring 2015, p.64)
Go see Muholi's work in her upcoming Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum running from May 1st - November 1st, 2015!!! (link below)
Links:
Read more of the Interview Here (subscribe for the full one - or read it in Barnes and Noble....not that I did that....)
