Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, a township near Durban, the youngest of eight children raised by a mother who worked as a domestic servant. Photography was not an obvious path for a Black working-class child in apartheid-era South Africa, but Muholi found a route in through the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, a school founded to train photographers from communities the industry had excluded, studying there under the documentary photographer David Goldblatt.

Muholi went on to complete a further degree in documentary media in Canada, and began photographing Black lesbian, gay, transgender and intersex South Africans at a time when the country's progressive constitution existed alongside widespread violence against queer people, including so-called corrective rape. The long-running portrait series Faces and Phases became a record of a community rarely photographed with dignity or care.

In 2012 Muholi's Cape Town home was broken into and more than twenty external hard drives holding years of photographs and negatives were stolen, while more valuable electronics were left untouched, a theft widely read as an attack aimed at the work itself. Muholi rebuilt and continued.

Later work turned the camera on Muholi's own body, in the series Somnyama Ngonyama, using props and dramatic lighting to confront the politics of Black skin and visibility. Muholi identifies as non-binary and describes the work as visual activism rather than art for its own sake.