Zanele Muholi

Why Photography

Muholi’s turn to photography grew from both activist experience and a personal need for images. In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Muholi recalled receiving a compact camera from a first lover and finding in photography a way to recover a sense of freedom and connection to themself.^*17 Muholi entered the Market Photo Workshop at age twenty-nine to study photography professionally and has said that there was a period when images communicated their experience more readily than words and photography helped save them.^*17 Photography became a means of reclaiming personal experience and leaving a visible record that people from the same community had lived.

Beginning around 2002, Muholi documented the lives of Black lesbians in South Africa who had experienced hate crimes, developing this work into Only Half the Picture. The Guardian contrasts this early series with the later Being, which photographs everyday intimacy.^*18 Legal rights coexisted with a continuing threat of violence in daily life, bringing activism and photography into the same work. Stevenson’s biography likewise describes Muholi’s work as a sustained record of Black LGBTQIA+ life, violence, and self-representation.^*1

Photographic Education in South Africa

The Market Photo Workshop, founded by David Goldblatt, became an important site of training for Muholi. In an interview with The Guardian, Muholi explained that the workshop helped formalize concerns they were already pursuing as photography and sharpened their method through discussion with other photographers.^*18 Muholi also names Goldblatt as an important mentor in The Brooklyn Rail, describing him as someone who offered an opportunity to learn when university education was financially difficult to access.^*17

At the same time, Muholi has remained attentive to the question of who has historically made photographs in South Africa. In Aperture’s feature on Faces & Phases, Muholi describes learning apartheid-era photographic history through the work of male photographers such as Ernest Cole, Alf Kumalo, and Goldblatt, and only later encountering the history of Black women photographers.^*10 That absence contributed to Muholi’s decision to make images from within the community and to challenge photographs that explained Black queer people from the outside.

Turning Portraiture into an Archive

Faces and Phases began in 2006 and is an ongoing project portraying Black lesbians, trans people, and gender-nonconforming participants together with their names, locations, and dates. Yancey Richardson describes it as an effort to rewrite a Black queer and trans visual history erased by discrimination and violence.^*3 Because the same participants reappear after intervals of time, a single portrait does not become a fixed “type.” Changes in hairstyle, clothing, age, and expression enter the archive as well. The Walther Collection likewise holds the series as a long-term visual record of a community.^*11

Kylie Thomas discusses Faces and Phases as an “intimate archive,” arguing that lesbian experiences made difficult to speak publicly enter established forms of memorial and portrait photography while changing those forms in the process.^*19 By placing portraits of living and deceased participants within the same sequence, deaths caused by violence do not disappear into anonymous statistics but remain located within communal memory. The archive becomes both a repository and an active intervention into whose lives and deaths enter the public record.

Frontal Portraiture and the Returned Gaze

Many Faces and Phases portraits are strongly frontal, with participants looking back into the camera. In MoMA’s Anele “Anza” Khaba, the face, clothing, and posture remain connected to a restrained background while the gaze is returned outward from the image.^*5 This composition prevents the viewer from settling comfortably into a position of one-way observation. In The Brooklyn Rail, Muholi also distinguishes between the experience of participants being “othered” by an unfamiliar photographer and being photographed by someone from the same community.^*17

For Muholi, “visibility” centers on who controls the image as well as on who is seen. In an interview with the Pew Center, Muholi explains a preference for the term visual activist over visual artist, placing human rights, self-representation, and ownership of one’s own voice at the center of the work.^*21 The portrait therefore functions as a site where participants determine how they appear, how they name themselves, and which image is carried forward, instead of presenting them as subjects already understood from the outside.

Photographing Intimate Daily Life

Being photographs lovers’ bodies, bedrooms, embraces, and moments of rest. Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, held by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, exemplifies the series’ effort to record Black lesbian life through intimate daily experience instead of only through scenes of violence or crisis.^*12 As Muholi tells The Guardian, “existing every day is political.” Making only the damage of violence visible would define communal life primarily through victimhood.^*18 The quiet scenes in Being were necessary to counter that imbalance.

Self-Portraiture and Black Representation

In Somnyama Ngonyama, Muholi turns the camera on themself, using familiar materials—clothespins, rubber gloves, tires, cables, fabric—as clothing and headpieces. In the artist statement published by Stevenson, the turn from photographing others to photographing themself marks a shift toward personally performing histories and present conditions surrounding the Black body.^*2 Aperture’s photobook connects each self-portrait to different circumstances of place, event, labor, colonialism, and racial representation.^*9

In the prints, Muholi deepens the black tones of the skin and heightens contrast with the whites of the eyes and everyday objects. Autograph describes this manipulation as a form of self-representation that questions the historical ways Black bodies have been seen.^*8 The New Yorker compares Muholi with staged self-portraiture by Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, and Carrie Mae Weems, while cautioning that locating the work only within that lineage risks weakening its protest against the historical representation of Black people and its effort to reclaim those images.^*22

Photobooks and the Long-Term Archive

Muholi’s portraits are exhibited individually, but grids, photobooks, and long-running series give them another function. The Faces and Phases photobook combines numerous portraits and testimonies, connecting individual faces to the duration of a community. Aperture presents the series as an ongoing publication of Black queer history in South Africa.^*10 In an interview with TIME, Muholi also describes the archive as a way for people to “be counted,” emphasizing that participants’ existence should not disappear from the record.^*23

Early Work and Being

Only Half the Picture is an early series combining hate crimes, traces of violence, bodies, and everyday life. It was presented as a solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. The Guardian identifies Muholi’s documentation of victims beginning around 2002 as an origin point for the work.^*18 The subsequent Being photographs intimate scenes between lovers, placing everyday affection alongside the record of violence.^*12

Faces and Phases

Faces and Phases is one of Muholi’s longest-running projects, with works held by institutions including MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Walther Collection. MoMA’s Sunday Francis Mdlankomo likewise shows the series’ characteristic structure of a frontal portrait against a restrained background.^*6 Works in the Brooklyn Museum collection further show the series’ incorporation into international museum collections.^*14 As the number of works grows, differences within the community become more pronounced than any single representative image. This accumulation is one of the series’ formal strengths.

Brave Beauties

Brave Beauties portrays trans women and gender-nonconforming participants through the self-staging of pageantry and fashion. SFMOMA’s Eye Me brought together Faces and Phases, Brave Beauties, and Somnyama Ngonyama, showing the continuity between portraiture, fashion, self-presentation, and Muholi’s activism.^*7 Here, beauty becomes a field in which participants use clothing, posture, and gaze to shape how they appear, creating a form of self-representation distinct from the archival structure of Faces and Phases.

Somnyama Ngonyama

Somnyama Ngonyama, a Zulu title translated as “Hail the Dark Lioness,” accumulates self-portraits made in different locations. Aperture’s photobook brings the series together in sequence and connects everyday materials used as costume, as well as the places of production, to specific histories.^*9 Works made before the self-portrait series, including the Guggenheim’s TK, 2010, show that the body and self-representation were already central concerns.^*15 Somnyama Ngonyama concentrates those questions on Muholi’s own face, placing the photographer’s body inside the same histories of gaze and self-representation.

After South African Documentary Photography

Muholi was trained within Goldblatt’s educational legacy and inherits a history in which South African photography documented social inequality during apartheid.^*17 Muholi also addresses how their own community was missing from historical photographic archives, placing the relationship between photographer and participant at the center of the work. In an Aperture interview, Muholi describes discovering earlier Black women photographers only later and links the scarcity of images like their own within established photographic history to the urgency of making new ones.^*10

Critiques of Visibility

Muholi gives social “visibility” different formal structures across the series. The frontal portraits of Faces and Phases, intimate scenes of Being, performances of Brave Beauties, and self-portraits of Somnyama Ngonyama each change who makes the image, how a person is recorded, and the unit through which the work is preserved, as well as who appears before the camera. Z'étoile Imma and Kylie Thomas interpret these differences in form as ways of resisting the reduction of Black queer and trans life to a single image of a social problem.^*20

The work has also met political hostility within South Africa. Thomas discusses a 2009 incident in which the minister of arts and culture at the time condemned an exhibition including Muholi’s work as “immoral” and walked out, arguing that the incident itself exposed a struggle over who is permitted to recognize queer bodies within public representation.^*19 Within this political conflict, frontal portraiture and archival accumulation become concrete forms for preserving lives that state and society had pushed outside the record as named, imaged presences.

Museums and Activism

Muholi’s work has been collected and exhibited by institutions including MoMA, SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Guggenheim, and has received broad recognition within the art museum system. MoMA’s artist page lists collection works including Faces and Phases alongside the artist’s exhibition history.^*4 In 2026, Muholi was named the recipient of the Hasselblad Award, with the foundation recognizing their sustained visual activism and contribution to photographic history.^*16

Muholi’s own definition of the work keeps activism and art continuous despite this institutional recognition. In Art21, Muholi discusses image-making and community-building as part of the same activity and treats photography as a means of preserving people’s voices and existence.^*13 At the Pew Center, Muholi likewise explains the self-description visual activist as a term that gives priority to human rights and self-representation.^*21 Even as museum recognition has expanded, the questions of who makes an image and for whom it is preserved remain criteria within the work.