CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/21/2016

Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases

In her extraordinary collection of portraits of black queer and transgender South Africans, photographer Zanele Muholi writes, "When I started capturing Faces and Phases eight years ago, I did not anticipate that the project would involve much more than documenting my community… What was initially a visual project became the creation of an unprecedented archive of photographs for my community and our country. I wanted to fill a gap in South Africa's visual history that, even 10 years after the fall of apartheid, wholly excluded our very existence. However, as I began to photograph friends, comrades, neighbors, the lovers of lovers, I became curious. I asked questions and looked into the eyes of black lesbian mothers, sisters, daughters and sons, wives and husbands. I was invited into their lives and I learned of their individual joys, hopes, longings, scars, suffering and endless love." Featured image is "Bathandwa Mosho, Braamfontein, Johannesburg" (2010).