Zanele Muholi
The key question that I take to bed with me is: what is my responsibility as a living being—as a South African citizen reading continually about racism, xenophobia, and hate crimes in the mainstream media? This is what keeps me awake at night.
Zanele Muholi via Aperture Foundation, 2018
Zanele Muholi (1972, South Africa) is a photographer and activist who gained renown with their work about the identity of the black LGBTQI community in modern-day South Africa. In a more recent series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi becomes both the participant and the image-maker, as they turns the camera on themselves. Experimenting with different characters and archetypes, Muholi’s self-portraits reference specific events in South Africa’s political history. By exaggerating the darkness of her skin tone, Muholi reclaims their blackness, and offsets the culturally dominant images of black people in the media today.
