Zanele Muholi
I am very excited to announce this week's featured photographer, Zanele Muholi. I was fortunate to meet Muholi, a South African photographer, while she was the artist in residency at Cassilhaus and at her pop up show at the Durham Fruit.
Muholi received her MFA in documentary media from the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto. She was first inspired by the portraits shot by American photographer Nan Goldin, while enrolled in the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg. She is internationally recognized as an artist and activist.
Muholi's self portraits portray a strong, beautiful African woman. Her face is larger than life, almost billboard size, and the tonal qualities in her images display wonderful contrasts in the black and white images, which is done deliberately to deepen her color. She embodies power and identities related to her country and the LGBT community. She stares right at you, towering in her image, drawing the viewer each time right to her eyes. The viewer can clearly see who she is: a human experimenting with her identity of African and female and lesbian- all of whom grew up in apartheid South Africa, a place where you could struggle with any of those identities.
Muholi as exhibited across the globe and has staked her place in the artistic world with her work being displayed in cities such as Paris, New York, and London.
© Zanele Muholi
