Phaphama at Cassilhaus, North Carolina

Zanele Muholi identifies as a “visual activist,” rather than an artist. For more than a decade, Muholi, a lesbian, has made portraits of Johannesburg’s black LGBTQI community, working to “re-write a black, queer, and trans visual history of South Africa . . . at the height of hate crimes in South Africa and beyond.” In this recent series, begun in 2014, Muholi turned the camera on themself, creating personas and characters in cities across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States—wherever the artist happened to be at the time. Phaphama, which means “awake” in Zulu, was created during a residency in North Carolina. Playing the role of a dandy, Muholi wears a leopard print vest, bow tie, and velvet jacket. With the activist looking directly and authoritatively at the viewer, this photograph, and the larger series, rejects the exoticized images of black women produced by and for men in colonial times. Encouraging us to consider the ways blackness has been denigrated, Muholi intentionally darkens their skin in the post-production of the prints: “By exaggerating the darkness of my skin tone, I’m reclaiming my blackness. My reality is that I do not mimic being black; it is my skin, and the experience of being black is deeply entrenched in me.”