Hail the black lioness

“La Maison Européenne de la Photographie [The European House of Photography] is proud to present the first retrospective in France devoted to Zanele Muholi, an internationally renowned South African photographer and activist whose work documents the life of the black LGBTQIA+ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual +) and the individuals who constitute it. This major event, which brings together more than 200 photographs, videos and installations created since the early 2000s as well as numerous archival documents, covers the full extent of Muholi's career to date, thus honouring one of today's most respected artists."

These words appear on the website of the Parisian institution where Muholi's three-month exhibition ends on Sunday.

They (Muholi prefers this genderless pronoun) see themselves as a visual activist and in their hands the camera becomes a weapon with which to expose issues in the South African community.

Muholi was born in Umlazi, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1972, the daughter of a domestic worker who worked for the same white family for four decades. 

In 2002, Muholi began documenting black queer women who were victims of hate crime. Interviews with 47 women resulted in the series of works Only Half The Picture. These portraits made the women visible as never before. This drew criticism from Pumla Dineo Gqola, gender activist and author of Rape: A South African Nightmare. She pointed out that this “hypervisibility" may make the women targets of homophobic violence and their possible vulnerability could increase the heinous crime of corrective rape.

In 2012, Muholi turned the lens on themselves. They created the series of self-portraits entitled Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail The Black Lioness).

In the portraits, they use everyday objects such as pot scourers and clothes pegs to create complex theatrical headdresses. The series consists of close-up black and white photographs. Contrast  is heightened by Photoshop during post-production.

What stands out is how the pigment of their skin darkens and how the whites of the eyes and mouth are highlighted. In an exhibition catalogue, Muholi writes how the portraits confirm black identity: “I am reclaiming my blackness which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other."

In work from the series Bester I, Mayotte (2015), the Afrikaans surname is a nod to Muholi's domestic worker mother. It's a self-portrait in which the clothes pegs form a crown. The composition recalls the set-up in the anthropological images of Irish-born South African photographer Alfred Duggan-Cronin's studio photographs published in the book The Bantu Tribes of South Africa. In Bester I, the look is confrontational but also projects the self-confidence of someone who speaks in their mother tongue, Zulu.

What makes Muholi's photograph extraordinary is the way in which it  highlights the politics of race and pigment in the historical photographic archives. It takes control of the archives. The black queer gains agency in an image that is constructed by themself. The intimate is claimed and acquires political charge. 

Muholi creates images that point the finger at those who maintain conservative values at the expense of identities other than the gender and ethnic self. They remind us that prejudice is still a conscious and unconscious part of our society, despite our progressive constitution.

♦ VWB ♦

An exhibition of Muholi's work, including some of their large bronze statues, as well as new photography in their Somnyama Ngonyama collection, can be viewed at the Southern Guild Gallery in Cape Town.

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