Zanele Muholi
Muholi’s portraits of Black lesbian, gay, trans and intersex South Africans are an archive of lives often met with violence.
Zanele Muholi grew up in Umlazi near Durban, the youngest of eight children; their mother worked as a domestic worker for a white family. Muholi trained as a photographer in Johannesburg and in 2002 co-founded the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, an organisation for Black lesbian women.
Muholi describes themself not as an artist but as a “visual activist”. Their long-term project “Faces and Phases” consists of hundreds of black-and-white portraits of Black lesbians, gay men, trans and intersex people in South Africa and beyond, who look directly into the camera. It is an archive against invisibility, in a country where lesbian women are still victims of so-called “corrective rape” and murder. Muholi also documented these crimes.
In the self-portrait series “Somnyama Ngonyama” (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi stages themself with everyday objects to explore race, gender and history. Their work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and in many other museums.
Muholi is non-binary and uses the pronoun “they”. In 2026 they received the Hasselblad Award, one of the most important prizes in photography.