Haunted by Solitude: Isolation and Representation in Zanele Muholi’s Archive

This paper focuses on contemporary South African photographer Zanele Muholi’s (b. 1972) extensive photographic archival project, Faces and Phases, which documents South Africa’s black queer community. The series exists not only as a book published in 2014, but as an exhibition that has been shown globally. In the introduction to her book of the Faces and Phases series Muholi states her goal as “[articulating] the collective pain [black lesbians] as a community experience” (emphasis mine). Yet the series, composed of over two hundred black and white portraits, is made up of photographs of individual black lesbians. This paper explores the central tension between the seclusion or isolation that is evident in the portraits of Faces and Phases and the objective of community representation that Muholi notes as her goal for the project. To situate Faces and Phases within a legacy of colonial archival projects, Muholi’s project will be examined in relation to Santu Mofokeng, another prominent South African artist.