#2-3: Zanele Muholi

I'm looking at the work of Zanele Muholi, who is a South African photographer and one of the most celebrated photographers in the world. One of the things Zanele does with her work is a series of self-portraits, exploring how to represent the African figure. In some of these images, she invokes herself with a deliberately darkened skin tone. She reflects here on the history of photography and on the stereotyping and misunderstanding of African images in Western culture.

These clichés depict African people as sunk in a "heart of darkness," associating them with tribalism, uncivilization, and barbarism. Zanele Muholi plays with these stereotypes in her work, looking directly into the camera, looking back at these stereotypes, and looking beyond them. She conjures herself in a range of different modes, representations, figures, and images, in a deliberate way to say she cannot be confined.

Here, Zanele conjures us out of time, time after time, as a different figure, a different persona, showing a different site or idea of possibility in the making.