Title: Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 2006-2014
Publisher: Steidl, Germany
Publication Date: 2014
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: New
Edition: 1st
367 pages includes index, chronology, glossary, essays by Gabeba Baderoon and the photographer. 18 x 24.5 cm. In original unopened publisher's shrink wrapping. First exhibited in 2013, Faces and Phases 2006-2014 is a portrait series of South African lesbians, targets of discrimination and hate crimes, despite twenty years of democracy. This project, published as a book last September, can be seen as a kind of "visual activism." It was started in 2006 by Zanele Muholi, who was moved by the loss of two young friends to HIV. (One had also been the victim of several assaults.) Muholi hopes to help black South African lesbians be more represented, and enrich the nascent visual history of a community which has, she says, been long ignored not only by the country's media, but also by the gay rights movement that began in the 1990s. Taken over the course of eight years, these 250 portraits, each more poignant than the last and accompanied by moving testimonies, are a convincing statement of the life and struggle of the subjects. Because Muholi herself is a part of this community, her work is inseparable from her own history. Therein lies the power of her photographs: she displays a sensitivity with the subject which only an "insider" could possess (Jonas Cuenin). Muholi writes, "When I started capturing Faces and Phases eight years ago, I did not anticipate that the project would involve much more than documenting my community… What was initially a visual project became the creation of an unprecedented archive of photographs for my community and our country. I wanted to fill a gap in South Africa's visual history that, even 10 years after the fall of apartheid, wholly excluded our very existence. However, as I began to photograph friends, comrades, neighbors, the lovers of lovers, I became curious. I asked questions and looked into the eyes of black lesbian mothers, sisters, daughters and sons, wives and husbands. I was invited into their lives and I learned of their individual joys, hopes, longings, scars, suffering and endless love.". Bookseller Inventory # 4322