From Figures and Fictions Contemporary South African Photography
- Tamar Garb: What role do you think photography plays in this visual activitism?
- Zanele Muholi: Visual material really helps people have an understanding that something exists. You can feel it, you can touch it: it's there. It's an opportunity to take that image and to freeze those moments, and for people to process it later on. So if we just write about the existence and the resistance and the struggles of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender groups in South Africa, it won't make sense without presenting and projecting those lives as images. [...] You are not only a lesbian alone, a gay person alone, or transgender or interest person alone: we come out with our families because they are the ones who have to explain to those who do not understand what's going on, and also educate others. The families get opportunities to see the pictures and get an understanding that its not only their daughter that is like this, but there are many people like her. That tangible document serves as a memory for many. Which is why for me this is beyond taking photographs for the fun of it: it's expensive and you have to take risks. And when you shoot queer people you are putting them at risk as well. You are making them visible.
![Photographer Zanele Muholi creates the Being series as an “intimate portrayal of the lives of black lesbian women in South Africa.”
Being is an exploration of both our existence and our resistance as lesbians/women loving women, as black women living our intersecting identities in a country that claims equality for all within the LGBTI community, and beyond.
The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as ‘unAfrican’, even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making. Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (hetero/homo, male/female, African/unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality[…]
Being is part of an ongoing journey to interrogate the construction of our sexualities and selves, and then to deconstruct ourselves, identity by painfully-earned identity, in order to see the parts that make up our whole.
Clockwise from the top:
Zinzi and Tozama III, 2010
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007
Being 2007](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvte30TfnV1qzw8zmo1_1280.jpg)
![Photographer Zanele Muholi creates the Being series as an “intimate portrayal of the lives of black lesbian women in South Africa.”
Being is an exploration of both our existence and our resistance as lesbians/women loving women, as black women living our intersecting identities in a country that claims equality for all within the LGBTI community, and beyond.
The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as ‘unAfrican’, even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making. Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (hetero/homo, male/female, African/unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality[…]
Being is part of an ongoing journey to interrogate the construction of our sexualities and selves, and then to deconstruct ourselves, identity by painfully-earned identity, in order to see the parts that make up our whole.
Clockwise from the top:
Zinzi and Tozama III, 2010
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007
Being 2007](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvte30TfnV1qzw8zmo7_r2_250.jpg)
![Photographer Zanele Muholi creates the Being series as an “intimate portrayal of the lives of black lesbian women in South Africa.”
Being is an exploration of both our existence and our resistance as lesbians/women loving women, as black women living our intersecting identities in a country that claims equality for all within the LGBTI community, and beyond.
The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as ‘unAfrican’, even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making. Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (hetero/homo, male/female, African/unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality[…]
Being is part of an ongoing journey to interrogate the construction of our sexualities and selves, and then to deconstruct ourselves, identity by painfully-earned identity, in order to see the parts that make up our whole.
Clockwise from the top:
Zinzi and Tozama III, 2010
Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007
Being 2007](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvte30TfnV1qzw8zmo8_r1_1280.jpg)
Photographer Zanele Muholi creates the Being series as an “intimate portrayal of the lives of black lesbian women in South Africa.”
Being is an exploration of both our existence and our resistance as lesbians/women loving women, as black women living our intersecting identities in a country that claims equality for all within the LGBTI community, and beyond.
The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as ‘unAfrican’, even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making. Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (hetero/homo, male/female, African/unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality[…]
Being is part of an ongoing journey to interrogate the construction of our sexualities and selves, and then to deconstruct ourselves, identity by painfully-earned identity, in order to see the parts that make up our whole.
Clockwise from the top:
- Zinzi and Tozama III, 2010
- Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg 2007
- Being 2007
