Faces and Phases: How Zanele Muholi’s Photography Queers the Archive

By Beth James

“Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, when it repels, or even stigmatises, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” – Roland Barthes.

South African photographer Zanele Muholi’s series Faces and Phases (2006 – ongoing) employs the medium of portraiture to document the lives, and legitimate existence, of the LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) community in South Africa and beyond. The project challenges the historical implications of a photographic archive and photographic documentation, specifically during apartheid, by subverting tradition and responding to the violence experienced by the LGBTI community, particularly the black lesbian community, that renders them invisible.

Zanele Muholi calls themselves a “visual activist” and has committed their work to documenting the lives of South Africa’s LGBTI community since the early 2000s in an effort to challenge and reverse the absence of LGBTI lives in the public spaces of South Africa. In 2002, they helped found the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW), with the aim of giving aid to black lesbians in the more disadvantaged townships of South Africa.

Muholi’s intentions in creating the series Faces and Phases stems from the canonical archive lacking visibility of the LGBTI community, especially the lives and voices of black lesbians. The South African Constitution has expressed the protection of LGBTI rights, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation since 1996, however, the violence experienced by the LGBTI community demonstrates a contrary reality. The violence inflicted upon LGBTI lives results in invisibility due to an openly non-heteronormative lifestyle being exposed to the dangers of an enforced patriarchal culture. The reality, and legitimacy, of gender fluidity is obfuscated by strict heteronormative ideologies in South Africa dating back the history of colonialism, and the resulting racism, which left behind a legacy of specific notions regarding sexuality. With conservative governments assuming a political stance of African “authenticity” to denounce gender and sexual fluidity, gaining visibility for the LGBTI community proves to be a provocative challenge.

Zanele Muholi, Lesedi Modise, Mafikeng, North West, 2010, Gelatin Silver Print (30 x 20 in).

[source: https://aperture.org/editorial/magazine-zanele-muholis-faces-phases/].

Faces and Phases intends to ensure that there is black queer visibility in the public spaces of South Africa. Muholi achieves this by photographing members of their personal LGBTI community, notably black lesbians, in a manner that is collaborative, respectful and empathetic. Muholi insists on referring to the individuals they photograph as “participants” rather than “subjects”, as using the term “subject” denies a genuine human connection between photographer and their participant. The resulting images are incredibly moving and confront the viewer to ask themselves, “What does a member of the African LGBTI community look like?”. Faces and Phases was needed as a project to lend a positive lens to the lives South Africa’s LGBTI community in order to take up space in the country’s visual archive and reclaim the right to visibility validating their existence withing South Africa’s visual historical record.

Yonela Nyumbeka, Makhaza, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, 2011, Gelatin Silver Print (30 x 20 in).

[https://aperture.org/editorial/magazine-zanele-muholis-faces-phases/].

The images of Faces and Phases work from an intersectional perspective – addressing race, sexuality, class - in rejecting the idea of an ethnographic “type”. While the individuals in their portraits may identify similarly in terms of their race, gender and/or sexuality, the images, predominantly half-length portraits produced in black and white, defy the ethnographic convention of “type” by being clearly distinct from one another. In understanding the risk of how such a project, especially one created during periods of intense sexual violence, has the potential to become easily appropriative, Muholi is mindful of documenting these unique voice and experience of each individual they photograph. Muholi collaborates with their participants and photographs them in the way that they want to be seen and made visible, allowing them to claim ownership of their voice and image. The portraits of Faces and Phases act as identification – proof of existence – and subvert the historical connotations associated with visual identification in South Africa by allowing the LGBTI community to become visible. The project is now in its fifteenth year and is a testament to the legitimate lives of the black LGBTI community that has been previously erased from history.

Zanele Muholi, Teekay Khumalo, BB Section, Umlazi, Durban, 2012, Gelatin Silver Print (30 x 20 in).

[source: https://aperture.org/editorial/magazine-zanele-muholis-faces-phases/].

Despite the harsh violent realities of the black LGBTI community, Muholi began to document the visual lives of their community for historic preservation, present representation, and for future generations. Faces and Phases is a series of celebration, defiance, mourning, and collective experience. In their series, Muholi positions the portraits of those in the community who have died alongside those who are still living. This draws attention to a collective mourning, a “community that transcends life and death,” and the fragile essence of life, especially the lives of those who reject a heteronormative lifestyle. The displaying of portraits of the dead and living together asserts a relation between the two and that they are read in conjunction to one another; the death of those lost casts a shadow of violence over those who are still living, and those who are living remember those who have been lost.

By applying the idea of queering the archive to Muholi’s Faces and Phases, the audience is caused to reckon with their way of thinking, the way of thinking that has been conditioned by the heteronormative patriarchal society in which they are a part of. To suspend, and hopefully erase, these traditional conventions of what one should “expect” to see when one is confronted with an image of a black lesbian, in the case of Muholi’s series, is to adopt a queer way of reading the images. By viewing Muholi’s portraits through a queer lens, the possibility of space for LGBTI lives becomes reality. Faces and Phases brings the struggle for visibility and legitimacy in public spaces to the audience in this way.

Notes:

Baderoon, Gabeba. ""Gender within Gender": Zanele Muholi's Images of Trans Being and Becoming." Feminist Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 390 – 416.

Muholi, Zanele. "Faces and Phases." Transition, no. 107 (2012): 113-24.

“Zanele Muholi,” Tate Modern, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/zanele-muholi.

Thomas, Kylie. “Zanele Muholi's Intimate Archive: Photography and Post-apartheid Lesbian Lives”, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 11, no.4 (2010): 421-436.

Van Der Vlies, Andrew. "Queer Knowledge and the Politics of the Gaze in Contemporary South African Photography: Zanele Muholi and Others." Journal of African Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2012): 140-56.