Artist, Zanele Muholi: If you don’t see yourself in mainstream publication, if you don’t see your kind on TV, you have a responsibility to produce this content that speaks to this moment. Faces and Phases—it’s a thesis of our presence.
My name is Zanele Muholi.
This project, Faces and Phases, documented more than a hundred members of the LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa. And it’s the only publication in the world of its kind.
This is Sunday Mdlankomo. I met Sunday, I thought: this is the most stylish person I’ve ever seen.
When I photograph someone, they have to look good. Because previously Black people have been unfairly presented by scholars from America or Europe, who had no understanding for what they presented or projected. So for each and every person that I photograph, I always simply ask, you have to feel yourself. Confront the lens, speak to that lens, and see that lens as a person who is looking at you.
It’s so difficult to live the life that we are living. The future needs to see us beyond our poverty, beyond our pain. Because somebody out there is looking and the future is waiting. This image will live beyond us.