Zanele Muholi

Zanele: What matters the most is the content, who is in the picture and why are they there? My name is Zanele Muholi, I call myself a visual activist I take photographs, I capture videos I just capture the moods that maybe other people cannot see.

I focus mainly on documentary photography and portraiture per se of black LGBTI people. Just to be precise, of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex persons from South Africa.

The work that I produce is meant to be for every person. It could be a teacher, it could be a mother whose child is queer and want to have a reference point to show to their kids and say that you are not alone, and it could be for the LGBTI people themselves to understand their worthiness then it becomes political, to say, "How do we politicize spaces with ourselves in a conscious way that tends to be ignored by those who are in positions of power?"

Talking about photography specifically and the need to capture images of ourselves, of our lives is not necessarily about beauty per se, but it's about the need of documenting realities of people who deserve to be heard, who deserve to be seen, and whose lives are often excluded as part of the Canon.

I want to believe that the work touches the soul in ways that you don't often see.

I like to call the people who are in my photographs not subjects, but participants And I think that to say they're subjects, we're divorcing ourselves from that human to human connection that's supposed to happen.

One of the projects that I've focused on is titled 'Somnyama Ngonyama' in which I'm praising my ancestry. I thought that it was very, very important for one to do so, because 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, by drawing back to historical moments. I have photographed so many people, I have captured so many videos and having documented painful experiences of other people without dealing with my own pain, I needed to remember me.

I don't mind to be in front of the camera because I know how uneasy it is sometimes for people to be in front of the camera. That picture to someone looks beautiful or ugly, but to me it means something because it's based on an experience that I have faced or went through.

'Only Half the Picture' is mostly about skin. I wanted to say that sexuality and gender of a person is skin deep; it's not about the clothes that we wear, how you speak, how you walk.

The queer self is the heart in my world, every human is beautiful, it's the kindness and what comes from within that is beautiful. It's not the outer layer.

Then there's 'Brave Beauties' which is a series mainly of transgender women who are former beauty queens. Beautiful girls that I've worked with for many years now. Then there is 'Faces and Phases', which is a series of black and white portraits featuring lesbian, bi, trans and gender-nonconforming bodies. Mostly head and shoulders, which is in your face. I wanted the viewer or the person being photographed engage with each other, so each and every portrait becomes one biography.

The fact that they are there means they have given our movement something that is whole, that helps the next person to know that they are not alone. It's one thing to say that photography's easy, it’s universal, it speaks so many languages but deep down to homophobes, queerphobes and transphobes, it differs because seeing maybe a flamboyant queen changes the context altogether.

So, what then I'm trying to do now, was to find a language that spoke to me as a Zulu speaking person to say, "Okay, I'm creating ‘self’ and ‘selves’ in space and I want people to understand our existence and presence to say, ‘we exist’"

So that existence comes with a visibility that is positive. Photography has given me that space to express the self in ways that I would not have been able to if I used another medium.

Photography, like videography, is super expensive, which I think limits many people with beautiful stories and important narratives that could be conveyed. And I started without knowing where the work was going to end up at places like Tate I knew that something important had to happen but I didn't know that it was going to end up in places.