← Find your twins
Zanele Muholi
art
Build looks around one sculptural focal point — a dramatic crown, hat or neckpiece — grounded with sharp, formal shirting and tailoring in a mostly dark palette.
Their world
into
wearable artphotographysculptural adornmentvisual activismtraditional zulu formsisicholosbeaded drapes
shops for
cap + hood + pendantcrown (jeans)formal archival garments (various)headdress / crownneckpiecewide-brim hat and scarf outfit
How they dress
palette
dark
materials
beadsdenimfabricfabric (cap)fabric (hat)fabric (scarf)
details
bowtiesclustered into crown-like formdozen combs arranged atop the headdress shirtselaborate beaded pendant tied around the neckhair styled into buns to mimic Statue of Liberty crownmakeshift crown built from a pair of jeansneat waistcoats
Photo © International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival «Side by Side» · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Where this read came from
- South African photographer Zanele Muholi: ‘My mother worked for a white family. I remember the pools I wasn’t allowed to swim in’ | Zanele Muholi | The Guardian
- InMedia The French Journal of Media StudiesinMedia
- Sir Zanele Muholi
- ‘Zanele the fire-eater’ is how one of her most ardent sitters describes her. For a decade and a half the South African photographer Zanele Muholi has been an indomitable defender of LGBTQ rights in her native country, where those rights (though extensively codified under South African law) are under constant assault. Muholi was born in Durban in 1972, and worked in factories and then as a hair stylist before taking up photography, initially as a purely documentary practice. In 2002 she cofounded the Forum for the Empowerment of Women: an organisation that gives support and shelter to black lesbians. Muholi at this point began documenting antigay hate crimes and in particular the ‘corrective’ rapes perpetrated against lesbians. Around the same time, she studied photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg (she already knew the photographs of its founder, David Goldblatt) and began making a body of work that includes intimate studies of queer life in her country – such as the photographs of naked and embracing couples that make up her series *Being* (2007) – and latterly some furiously playful self-portraits.
- Contesting the Legacy of South African Visual Culture: Black Queer Bodies in Zanele
A read of how their style appears publicly. Not an endorsement.
Want to know who yours are?
Read my photos