Amanda Mapuma, Vredehoek, Cape Town, 2011

Artist Zanele Muholi South African, born 1972, Umlazi, active in Johannesburg, South Africa

Date2011, printed 2014

MediumGelatin-silver print

DimensionsImage: 30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm)
Frame: 35 1/2 x 25 in. (90.2 x 63.5 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Friends of Photography

Object number2016.6

On View

Not on view

Label TextAn ardent Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) "visual activist," Muholi uses photography to document and challenge the discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTQ community in South Africa. These portraits are part of Muholi's ongoing series Faces and Phases in which Muholi presents positive images of South Africa's LGBTQ community in order to confront social assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices. Muholi takes portraits in black and white as a reference to a long line of documentary photography, including Seydou Keita's studio portraits in Mali in the 1940s and 1950s as well as images by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Alex Soth, and others. Their subjects, like Muholi's, look straight at the camera: openly, defiantly, shyly, proudly.
[Rotation, African Galleries, December 2020; A. Maples; edited J. Ledesma, 2025]
ProvenanceCreated South Africa, 2011, printed 2014; collection of the artist; [Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York]; sold to NCMA, 2016.
Published ReferencesZanele Muholi, Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 2006–2014 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014), 129, illus.
Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, “Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases,” October 1, 2016–January 8, 2017.

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "The People's Collection, Reimagined," June 5, 2023-November 28, 2023. Object Rights Statement

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