Fine Art - Zanele Muholi: Witness, lineage, and the right to be seen
- Lisa Smith
- Jan 10
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 6
Week 1 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music
Zanele Muholi describes their work as visual activism, but that framing almost undersells what’s happening. Muholi’s photographs don’t argue for visibility so much as they practice it. They document Black queer and trans lives with care, intention, and insistence—creating an archive where one did not reliably exist before.
There is a steadiness to Muholi’s work that feels grounding. The portraits are direct. Subjects meet the camera without performance or apology. Nothing is softened to make the viewer more comfortable, but nothing is sensationalized either. What you’re asked to do is simple and demanding at the same time: look properly.
The long-running series Faces and Phases is a clear place to start. It’s a growing collection of portraits of Black lesbian, bisexual, and trans people, primarily in South Africa. Seen together, the images read less like individual artworks and more like a community asserting its own continuity. This is what lineage looks like when it’s built deliberately. Each photograph says: we were here, we are here, and we deserve to be remembered accurately.
That idea—documentation as survival—connects deeply to Week 1’s theme. Like a live album that captures a moment and preserves its truth, Muholi’s work understands that memory doesn’t happen by accident. Someone has to show up. Someone has to witness. Someone has to decide that these lives matter enough to be recorded carefully.
Muholi’s later self-portrait series, Somnyama Ngonyama (“Hail the Dark Lioness”), complicates this further. In these images, Muholi turns the camera on themselves, using costume, gesture, and contrast to interrogate race, gender, labor, and colonial power. The photographs are striking, sometimes confrontational, but never abstract. They’re deeply embodied. You’re aware of the artist’s presence, their body, their control over how they are seen.
What’s powerful here is the refusal to separate visibility from agency. These are not images made for consumption. They are images made with purpose. Much like Ani DiFranco’s work, the intensity is not excess—it’s precision. Every choice feels considered.
For queer viewers especially, Muholi’s work can feel like recognition rather than representation. It doesn’t explain queerness. It assumes it. It doesn’t ask permission to take up space. It takes it, calmly and firmly.
As a standalone practice, Muholi’s art reminds us that visibility is not just about being seen—it’s about being seen correctly, in context, and with care. As part of this project, it grounds Week 1 in something essential: the understanding that queer culture survives because people document each other, archive each other, and refuse to let each other disappear.
This is not nostalgia. It’s continuity.
Check out their work
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