Why this photographer prefers to be called a ‘visual activist’

(CNN) — “The lack of queer visual history compelled me to produce what was missing,” says Zanele Muholi of their creative practice. For more than two decades, the 52-year-old South African photographer has turned their camera on the country’s LGBTQ community, bringing the stories of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex lives to major art institutions around the world, raising questions about race and representation, and fostering a spirit of empowerment.

In Europe, a touring Zanele Muholi survey has been presented in museums from Paris and Berlin to Copenhagen and Reykjavik, and recently opened at London’s Tate Modern. It runs concurrently with two US shows: “Zanele Muholi: Eye Me” at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, their first major West Coast exhibition (ends August 11), and a showcase of new work at Southern Guild gallery in Los Angeles (until August 31). Between them, the work on display ranges from Muholi’s best-known photographs to their new bronze sculptures.

Yet Muholi doesn’t refer to themself as an artist; instead they prefer the term “visual activist,” highlighting how they advocate for social change. In 2002, for instance, Muholi started work on their first photographic series, “Only Half the Picture” (2002–2006), documenting survivors of hate crimes across South Africa’s townships. At the same time they co-founded the Forum for the Empowerment of Women — South Africa’s first black lesbian rights organization. For while South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution of 1996 outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation — the first country in the world to do so — queerphobic violence remains an ever-present threat.

“A lot of experiences that people face and activities that are taking place need to be documented so that we have a proper archive, which didn’t exist before,” said Muholi during the opening of the Tate Modern show. “You have to think of the future and how the work becomes a reference point for scholars and educators. Walking around the exhibition — their largest solo show to date — “I distance myself from the work,” they explained. “I want to be in the head of the viewer, wondering what they see when they look at this work. Where do they place themselves?”

For the exhibition’s co-curator Carine Harmand, “Muholi’s work is very much for and by the black queer community.” She highlights an image in “Only Half the Picture” that shows two women laughing while trying on clothes: “It shows joy and resilience. Muholi never shows people as victims; they show them as people who live, love and care for each other.” Instead of referring to the people in their images as “subjects,” Muholi sees them as “participants.”

In “Faces and Phases,” an ongoing “living archive” of more than 600 portraits started in 2006, Muholi celebrates Black lesbians, transgender and gender non-conforming people in beautiful and bold, black and white images — 150 of which are on display at the Tate Modern. Other series include “Being” — intimate images of couples — and “Brave Beauties,” portrayals of trans women and non-binary people, often beauty pageant contestants, photographed in the style of fashion magazine covers.

“Muholi is an artist who understood early in their career the power of the photographic image to represent marginalized individuals and identities,” writes Tate Modern director Karin Hindsbo in the exhibition catalogue. “At the point of their retrospective in 2024, the proliferation of photographic images… makes the singular style and activist reach of Muholi’s body of work all the more recognizable as highly significant, and pioneering.”

Images with their own story

Perhaps most iconic is Muholi’s ongoing series of self-portraits, “Somnyama Ngonyama” — which translates as “Hail The Dark Lioness.” When Muholi’s show first opened at Tate Modern in 2020 (a run that was cut short due to the Covid lockdown), they explained: “When we document and photograph other people, we tend to forget about ourselves. I wanted to find an artistic expression to deal with the painful experiences that I was going through but drawing back to historical moments. I’m praising my ancestry.”

First started in 2012, the images often make use of imaginative props — from beaded necklaces and blankets to blown-up plastic gloves and felt-tip pens — while Muholi directly confronts the viewer with their gaze. For Harmand, the series is “an accumulation of experiences of Blackness. Each of the images has its own story — sometimes personal stories, sometimes historical events: colonial histories, apartheid, postcolonial histories of displacement, of violence, but also fetishization of the Black body.”

Muholi was born in 1972 in Umlazi, a South African township south-west of Durban. The youngest of eight children, their father died shortly after they were born. “I don’t come from a household where you’d be encouraged to become an artist,” they said. “I come from a space where you’re told that a professional is a nurse or a teacher, scientists and engineers.”

Someone who did encourage Muholi to pursue a creative path, however, was David Goldblatt, the late South African photographer best known for his portrayals of life during the time of Apartheid. In 2003, Muholi took a photography course at the Market Photo Workshop, the training institution founded by Goldblatt in Newtown, Johannesburg in 1989. “He was my mentor,” they said. “I learnt a lot from him.”

In turn, Muholi offers support to young South Africans. “Somebody rescued me and saved me, so I feel that I need to extend the love to the next generation,” they said. “It’s important.” From the sales of Muholi’s work, 30 percent is used to fund philanthropic projects. To date, this has included supporting nearly 100 people to study at both the Market Photo Workshop and Orms Cape Town School of Photography. Since 2020, the project has been defined as the Muholi Art Institute, “a mobile art institute for young and upcoming visual artists from South Africa”, offering residencies, studios and exhibition spaces.

At the opening of the Tate show, Muholi referred to their multifaceted work as “tiring”. Jet-lagged from a Los Angeles-London flight, they said: “There’s a lot of work still to be done,” while also acknowledging the role that major institutions play in this work. “Tate is big business. A lot of education is taking place here. When children have access to art from an early age, they become better artists, they become well-informed adults.”

Trevyn McGowan, co-founder of the Cape Town and LA-based Southern Guild gallery, notes: “Muholi also sees their participation in their exhibitions as vital. They show up again and again and again.”

The LA show itself combines recent additions to the “Somnyama Ngonyama” series with bronze sculptures that range from the classically figurative to a bronze cast of their clitoris, produced on a monumental scale. “It’s a new body of work which speaks on visibility,” said Muholi. “I wanted to expand the practice and also to learn from that expansion.” Their new material is laden with art-historical references that are both channeled and subverted by Muholi. “There’s something about this massive piece of work…” they said. “It’s a way in which you claim the space. People won’t easily forget it.”

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