Zanele Muholi’s Transformations
Look Again. Photograph from the series Somnyama Ngonyama. Credit: Zanele Muholi/Yancey Richardson Gallery/Stevenson Gallery.
Zanele Muholi featured in The New York Times Magazine
Zanele Muholi’s Transformations – A photographer known for taking striking portraits of members of the black queer community in South Africa turns the camera on herself.
By JENNA WORTHAM, The New York Times Magazine OCT. 8, 2015
Jenna Wortham visited visual activist Zanele Muholi in Syracuse, New York and saw how Zanele is working on a new art project. In the above mentioned article she writes about Zanele’s creative practice:
“She thinks of these selfportraits as autobiographical. They explore the elements of her personality — female, African, gay — and where they blur together and pull apart. She wants to undo the damage of growing up in a society that drew its strength from demonizing blackness, which is part of the reason she drastically darkens her skin tone in the photographs. It is her most deliberate declaration that she is black and that she is beautiful.
‘When I was young, I was told that I was ugly, and I had to grow up with a sense of ugliness and shame,’ she says. ‘And I had to overcome it, because nobody can love you more than you.’ She titled the series ‘Somnyama Ngonyama,’ which means ‘Hail the Dark Lioness.’”
Photograph from the series Somnyama Ngonyama. Credit: Zanele Muholi/Yancey Richardson Gallery/Stevenson Gallery.
Read the full article: Zanele Muholi’s Transformations – A photographer known for taking striking portraits of members of the black queer community in South Africa turns the camera on herself by Jenna Wortham.