Zanele Muholi’s Transformations [NYTIMES/ARTICLE]

From The New York Times
By JENNA WORTHAM [OCT. 8, 2015]

A photographer known for taking striking portraits of members of the
black queer community in South Africa turns the camera on herself.

One morning in August, as the sun brightened the sky over Syracuse, Zanele Muholi woke up thinking about her breasts. She had a cancer scare recently, and the dissection of female bodies lingered in her mind, kindling a concept for a photograph. She wanted to make a neckpiece similar to the beaded drapery worn by Zulu women during marriage ceremonies, only hers would be made of masking tape and tissues. It would form a bodice that looked like a cage — confining her body as much as adorning it.

Muholi, a photographer from South Africa, was in Syracuse on a residency with the photography collective Light Work, and she had decided to take daily self-­portraits for the duration of her stay. She had invited me over in the early afternoon to watch her process, but she wasn’t ready to begin until late at night. It was as if she kept finding reasons not to take her photo. Calls had to be made, emails sent, lunch prepared. The weather created delays, too: Every few hours, the clouds unleashed downpours that made it impossible to shoot outside in natural light, which Muholi prefers. She finally asked her assistant, Lerato Dumse, a quiet woman with a shaved head, to help her start setting up around 10 p.m.

Self-­­portraiture is a departure for Muholi, who has devoted much of her career to a voluminous body of work called ‘‘Faces and Phases.’’ She spent the last decade training her camera on those around her, primarily black, gay communities in South Africa, both her own and those that overlap in ever-­widening concentric circles. These portraits, which she still shoots, depict lesbians and transgender men dressed to the nines, gazing at the viewer with a sort of placid resolve. The photos leave you with the sense that these are people who simply want to be seen, to have their life entered into the record.

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below: ‘Bester I’ (Mayotte archipelago, 2015)