Collection
/
Photography

Sunday Francis Mdlankomo, Vosloorus, Johannesburg

Zanele Muholi

Brooklyn Museum photograph

Object Label

Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases series creates a visual repository of Black lesbian, transgender, and queer sitters in South Africa and its diaspora—one whose prior absence the artist linked to a history of invisibility, violence, and discrimination in the country. While legal rights for LGBTQ+ citizens in South Africa are among the most progressive in the world, these photographs respond to the discrepancies that exist between constitutional protections and lived experiences of gender and sexual violence. Muholi’s portraits emphasize a direct, frontal gaze and sense of self-assertion, interrupting a viewing of the subjects and their diverse identities as marginal.

Caption

Zanele Muholi (South African, born 1972). Sunday Francis Mdlankomo, Vosloorus, Johannesburg, 2011. Gelatin silver print, sheet: 33 7/8 × 23 7/8 in. (86 × 60.6 cm) image: 29 15/16 × 19 15/16 in. (76 × 50.6 cm) frame: 34 1/8 × 24 1/8 in. (86.7 × 61.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Robert A. Levinson Fund, 2012.72.1. © Zanele Muholi. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Gallery

Not on view

Collection

Photography

Title

Sunday Francis Mdlankomo, Vosloorus, Johannesburg

Date

2011

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Classification

Photograph

Dimensions

sheet: 33 7/8 × 23 7/8 in. (86 × 60.6 cm) image: 29 15/16 × 19 15/16 in. (76 × 50.6 cm) frame: 34 1/8 × 24 1/8 in. (86.7 × 61.3 cm)

Credit Line

Robert A. Levinson Fund

Accession Number

2012.72.1

Rights

© Zanele Muholi

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Frequent Art Questions

  • Tell me more.

    I love Zanele Muholi. Her work is so political. She considers herself a visual activist who has dedicated her career to promoting awareness of her native South Africa’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex communities.
    These two photographs are from her ongoing portrait series Faces and Phases that she began in 2006.
    She focuses on the region’s black lesbian community, presenting her subjects frontally, their penetrating gazes stoic yet vulnerable.
    Wow she must have faced a lot of backlash.

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Artists and makers

Zanele Muholi

2 works in the collection

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