Reading Zanele Muholi’s photographs entails navigating a complex trail through the slipstream of contemporary discourse. Their visceral content demands a critique predicated on issues of gender and race. And Muholi insists on ”cracking open the issues”, ”making visible” and ”making heard” women gagged by violence, doctrine and fear. She has already achieved this through tireless activism and an almost feverish process of visual documentation.
But reading her work solely through the lens of recycled discourse inadvertently perpetuates some of the stereotypes she seeks to banish, albeit on the righteous side of cultural correctness. Avoiding the emotional energy that permeates her images amounts to seeing — as the title of her exhibition suggests — only half the picture.
In this show, there is no borrowing from the histories or subcultures of ”others”. Muholi depicts less a lifestyle than a life experienced with unplugged intensity. Hers is a hate-to-love story. The former emotion is predominantly articulated in earlier black-and-white images exhibited in one room: strident, hard-edged documents of hate acts inflicted on women. Her more recent works, exhibited in the adjacent space, are looser and their nuances are more layered. Still raw, honest and unadorned, they are like ripped-out pages of a diary, thematically structured without losing their obsessive energy. They are about sexuality, sex and femaleness. Principally, they are visual odes to intimacy.
Friends, lovers and mentors, they are women whose spaces seem unmediated by the camera lens. ”My work is preservative free,” quips Muholi. ”No special lighting, make-up or Photoshop effects.”
Something of a wordsmith, Muholi with prudence chooses her terms and acronyms. She ”captures images but doesn’t steal them”. She refuses to refer to the people she photographs as ”subjects” because of the word’s obvious associations with subjugation. A proud graduate of the Market Photography Workshop, she consciously eschews the multi-referencing of academically trained artists. She describes her work as one of ”production, autonomy and processing — the ‘pap’ approach”.
On the subject of pap and smears, her period pieces are clearly the most contentious images in her current exhibition, Only Half the Picture. These are liable to provoke the most visceral responses. Featuring bloodstained tampons, pads and grass, they constitute a multi-pronged riposte to myths surrounding menstruation. Myths that are perpetuated both in traditional societies — where menstruating women are perceived as dangerous and banned from entering the cattle kraal — as well as through the mass media and advertising. These works defiantly expose a bodily function, literally, blocked from view by mini penis-shaped plugs. They speak of violence and violation. But once their shock value has subsided, they become somewhat trite and didactic (and, in the opinion of this writer, the weakest series on the show).
It is the works in which Muholi is not principally issue-driven that are most resonant. The Triplets series, for example, is a playful, almost abstracted evocation of a ”threesome”, and a profound depiction of intimacy. The third image of the series shows three ”spooning” pairs of legs. Without contextual knowledge, these forms might be street youths snuggling to keep out the cold. More enticingly, their interwoven limbs recall the sinuous python dances or Domba rites performed by Venda maidens as part of their initiation into marriage and motherhood. Despite Muholi’s dismissal of the aesthetic component of her work, this series also constitutes an exploration of form and composition. It is an unashamedly erotic depiction of the contours, textures and visual rhythms of bums, limbs and skin.
The connection between worn female flesh and the gnarled skin of a tree inspired a photograph that serves as a powerful metaphor for womanhood and the fulcrum around which the series revolve.
”When a tree is chopped, it bleeds. A rose wilts when torn from its roots.” Muholi encountered the tree during a visit to Caracas, Venezuela, where she was presenting a paper at the World Social Forum. ”I fell in love with it,” she reminisces. ”I had such a sense of its presence even before I saw it — almost as though we were conducting an intra-personal communication.” Yet she wouldn’t touch the tree, or even sit in the womb-like hollow formed by its roots. ”I couldn’t bring myself to. It would have been an imposition.”
Yet touch is the gesture primarily associated with women — an act of connection and comfort. But, like menstruation, touch is also associated with pain. ”I was documenting cases of rape all the time. I would never have touched the women in my photographs. Touching them would perpetuate their violation.”
Conversely, touch pervades her more recent images. She calls them her ”sixth-sense works”. They are about caresses, tastes, smells, sight, listening and thought. Muholi is in all of them. She displays her own bruises as empowering badges of honour.
”Growing up, I didn’t have the freedom to explore my sexual identity or my place in the world, my home and in myself. My mother is an extraordinary woman, who accepts me unconditionally, but she was working to raise eight children on her own, and there was no father figure. My dad had died.
”There wasn’t so much confusion, just a lot of pain because there was no one to turn to.”
When Muholi ”came out”, it was to a ”straight” older friend, ”the most beautiful woman in the world”.
She is immortalised in Reclining Figure. Like the Flesh series, it is a magnificent study of unselfconscious, unadorned femaleness. Although it lends itself to multiple art-historical references, for Muholi it is primarily a token of love.
And perhaps the most telling images, in terms of Muholi’s artistic maturation, are the ones in the series Closer to My Heart. Photographed at the Cradle of Mankind heritage site, it is a sequential narrative of Muholi and her partner embracing, their ethereal shadows resembling rock engravings. But this work also evokes transience. It is about letting go, because holding on would be tantamount to caressing a shadow.
Zanele Muholi’s exhibition Only Half the Picture shows at the Michael Stevenson Gallery on De Smidt Street, Cape Town, until April 26. For more info, call (021) 421 2575