For more than two decades, Muholi has been building a global audience, exploring the power of art to educate audiences about the LGBTQ+ community. One of their early series was Faces and Phases (2006–), which is composed of portraits of Black South African lesbians and transgender people. In 2012, Muholi started the series of self-portraits that became Somnyama Ngonyama. The photos were edited into a two-volume monograph published by Aperture and were also featured in The Guggenheim’s 2019 exhibition “Implicit Tensions,” in which Muholi, alongside Catherine Opie, Glenn Ligon, and Lyle Ashton Harris, among others, became part of a lineage of artists grappling with the legacy of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Thinking about the future of their practice, Muholi brought up two radical self-portraitists who came before them: Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun. Both share Muholi’s unrelenting gaze and powerful sense of self-regard. It’s clear that there is a vitality in this kind of image making—a seriousness of purpose that comes with creating their own visual archive of Black queerness where one has been lacking. “To be invisible is painful. To make that silence visible is political. It is what I’m doing with my work. That forms part of my ongoing activism.”