South African photographer Zanele Muholi doesn’t mince words when it comes to what she wants to accomplish. “Like any other great men, I want to be counted in history,” she says. “I want to produce ...

Zanele Muholi prefers not to be known as an artist; instead, the South African photographer, who was born in Umlazi at the height of apartheid, identifies as a “visual activist.” A quick look at their ...

Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, on view through May 10, 2026, explores how photography has been used throughout time as a medium of expression, ...

Looking at the astonishing pictures in Zanele Muholi’s recent series, “Somnyama Ngonyama” (which means “Hail the Dark Lioness” in Zulu), it’s tempting to start mentally sketching an art-family tree.

The first retrospective in France devoted to renowned South African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi has opened in Paris. The exhibition brings together more than 200 works documenting the life ...

Qiniso, The Sails, Durban, 2019. By Zanele Muholi, courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York. Bona, Charlottesville, 2015. By Zanele Muholi, courtesy ...

Walk into the Center for Visual Art MSU Denver, and you’ll find photographic imagery staring back at you in a stark black-and-white message of politics and the personal. The exhibition, Somnyama ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Zanele Muholi’s “Julie I, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2016,” is one of 80 self-portrait on display at CVA. (Provided by the Center for Visual Art)We like to talk ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. MaID II, Atlanta, 2017, from the self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama ...

Monumental and full of grace, Zanele Muholi’s exquisite images of South Africa’s black LGBT and township communities are a magnificent act of solidarity There is an image so astonishing in this ...