Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation that took place on June 20Bernardine Evaristo: Part of my project as a writer is to make visible Black women and people from marginalised communities, especially in my novel Girl, Woman, Other. Can you tell me something about your project as a photographer?Zanele Muholi: I have a book called Faces and Phases [published in 2010], which is also about making people visible — Black gay women, bisexual women, gender non-binary people and lesbian-identifying human beings. I guess it was the first book of its kind to come from Africa. We didn’t have much visual history of those communities.My focus is on South Africa, the country of my birth. Coming out in this space, you need to see likenesses, to see people like you. That way, you know you have a community you can speak to, or speak of, or just relate to. So, you and I share commonalities in that way. Our work is to undo invisibility. To ensure that whatever, whoever we present or write about, it is done in the most decent way. Because if we don’t do this for ourselves, no one will.BE: Well, that’s right. And it’s about filling in the gaps, isn’t it? And about changing the perspective. So we met at the opening of your major retrospective at Tate Modern. Did you think, years ago, that you were one day going to be exhibiting at some of the world’s major galleries?ZM: At the beginning, I didn’t know where the work was going to end up. I didn’t know anything about Tate. Between 2001 and 2003, I was at photography school at Market Photo Workshop in South Africa, which was founded by David Goldblatt, who later became my mentor. I didn’t know how the world was going to receive the work. At the beginning, it was not shown at the galleries, it was at the universities. Scholars and feminists wrote papers on it. For me, it wasn’t about fame and fortune, it was what I had to do, or what needed to be done. We needed it — I needed it — because I didn’t have any reference points. I didn’t see photographs of LGBTQIA+ people. BE: I find your photographs very interesting because it feels as if you’ve captured people’s humanity beyond gender. For 150 years or so, there was a particular gaze on African subjects, a colonial gaze. But what you’ve done with your photographs is capture their humanity. And also, the people you photographed are presented as powerful. They are powerful. And there’s a sense of equality about them looking at us. Even today, that’s quite rare to see. What did you want to capture?ZM: Well, to turn that undermining gaze, that vilifying gaze, on its head, I had to put myself in the shoes of those who were standing in front of me — beautiful human beings who I’d never seen in mainstream magazines before. Each time a person stood in front of me, I was that person. But at the same time, I knew that somebody who might not speak the same language as them would be able to relate to that person, connect somehow, even without hearing their voice. Just their presence was key.Every time I photograph, I have to feel the energy of the person standing in front of me. And I want them to look good at all times. I don’t want them to be “other”, I don’t want to repeat the mess of the past. My approach is not that of an outsider.So I think, how would I like someone to capture me? Even now, when somebody photographs me, I have to say, “This is how I want to look.” I have to engage with the person taking the photograph because I want to look decent. Same thing applies to the people I photograph. Is this how they want to be seen? Is this how I want the world to know us?You know, we’re speaking of images that will live beyond us. Like how we look at the images of Black Americans by WEB Du Bois [shown at the 1900 Paris Exposition]. That’s the book that changed my life, it did something to me. I thought, how are we looking at these images more than a hundred years later? The past is so present, even when technology has changed so much.BE: Yes. Thinking about technology, can you tell me why you work with black and white photography in particular?ZM: I’m trained in black and white photography. I’m a darkroom person. I am an analogue person. It feels better, it’s tangible, you know? It has a timeless feel, a classical feel. And the fact that you have to anticipate what will come out of what you have captured. It’s not like how we use digital photography now, where you can see what you have captured, make decisions, delete, start again. Not so. You had to wait for a week before something that you captured came out.BE: You also have that enormous colour photograph of the queer beauty queens on the beach, which is so joyful and celebratory. Why did you choose colour for that? I guess it seems like an obvious question.ZM: Those are [from the series] Brave Beauties. The girls like colour. They are out and about. What I like doesn’t necessarily mean that other people like it. I could explain the timeless and classical feel of the black and white, but that doesn’t mean that other people would like it too. So when I photograph the girls, they prefer colour.Also colour photography gives you what is in the background and the foreground, which is good for capturing that kind of public space — that vibrancy and movement is so distinct. Whereas when I photograph in black and white, I have a more minimal approach. If I were to do the girls on the beach in black and white, it would look so busy and confusing.BE: You also make self-portraits where you use everyday household objects as adornment. I find them very imaginative. They’re witty, but also very loaded. There isn’t a sense that you’re playing around when we look at your face, which is deadly serious, but you have clothes pegs in your hair, or lots of afro picks sticking up, or brillo pads. It’s extraordinary, the mix of all those things together. It looks really strange but also mesmerising.ZM: When you look at clothes pegs, you look at pens, when you look at sponges, rubber gloves, a hoover, they speak of Black people and work. They speak of labour, survival. They speak of a hard life, you know, where you have to remove stains that you cannot remove from your brain because work is work. Those photographs speak of minimum-wage work, and how it impacts on people of different races. Life on the margins.Some of the pictures relate to my mother’s work. The clothes pegs — that’s a tribute to my mum, who was a domestic worker for more than 40 years. She was absent most of the time because she had to work for white families. That’s my reality, and it’s projected in these photographs in a not so serious and deep and bruised way. There’s a level of whimsy to it. But at the same time, it’s not whimsical at all.I’m inviting people to analyse each and every piece used in these photographs. Because if I say “afro combs”, for example, what does that mean to you, as a Black-identifying person? So, then we are no longer looking at Zanele Muholi’s Black portraits, but we are looking for ourselves in them, or we are looking for our relatives and those we lost along the way trying to get to where we are now. A pen equals you, Bernardine. If they were to lock you up in some space without a pen and paper, it means that you are done as a writer. If they locked me somewhere without a camera, it means they are depriving me of my right to express myself. Because just looking might not be enough. Once I have captured it and documented it, it means that particular thing exists.BE: So activism is a really strong part of what you do. It’s also a very strong part of what I do. My activist spirit underpins some of the themes I explore in my novels, but the novels themselves — literary fiction — are not activist, if that makes sense? But you don’t describe yourself as an artist, you describe yourself as a “visual activist”. Can you explain what you mean by that?ZM: Because artists are activists. Any person who, say, responded to George Floyd’s passing, that person is speaking on the politics of existence, on the politics of being bullied and ambushed in broad daylight. And that person activates spaces. Artists are human beings who activate spaces using their art. So when I say, “I’m a visual activist”, I’m basically saying I’m an activist living in the visual art world. And in particular, I’m trying to stress this gender politics of ours.Like now, we’ve been speaking of under-represented communities. Not enough books exist at the library that are written by people like you. That’s the activism that I’m talking about. That’s the constant erasure that we have been dealing with, until somebody says “enough”.BE: I mean, I believe that all art is political, or rather that you can look at everything through a political prism. It’s very hard to disengage art from politics, although there are lots of people who attempt just this. They say, it’s just art, there’s no politics involved.ZM: Your book Girl, Woman, Other is about these same topics.BE: Yeah, it’s a book about 11 Black British women and one who is non-binary. They are aged 19 to 93 and they come from a variety of different backgrounds and have different professions, lifestyles, sexualities. So it’s a book about the multiplicity of Black British womanhood. And it’s very experimental in form, I call it fusion fiction. It was published in 2019, and it was my eighth book. And because it won the Booker Prize, it’s the one that everybody knows.ZM: Oh, lovely. Congratulations!BE: Because of this, my career changed. It took 40 years for me to breakthrough, you know, for people to pay attention to me in the way that they do now.ZM: That’s nice.BE: It is really nice.ZM: All because of the Booker Prize — that’s amazing!BE: It was because of one prize, yeah. But like you, I was writing the books I wanted to write about the African diaspora from my perspective — historical, alternate reality and so on. And some of them are queer inclusive. I’ve just been doing my own thing for a very long time.ZM: Did you ever feel like giving up after not seeing the results of what you were doing?BE: Very briefly, but not for very long, because I love writing. And to be honest, what else was I going to do? Also it’s not as if I was completely in the shadows. I was getting published. I was getting a degree of recognition. But when you spend five years on a book, for example, and you sell a few hundred copies, that’s tough, right? So I always had to have other sources of income. I’ve had what’s called a “portfolio career”, juggling lots of different activities relating to my writing and in the arts.ZM: Do you know the work of [the photographer] Joy Gregory?BE: Yes, I know Joy!ZM: I love her work.BE: She’s amazing, and she is still going strong after all these years. ZM: She just published a book of Black female British photographers from the 1980s and 1990s.BE: That’s really interesting, because a lot of the artists of my generation, who’ve been creating art for as long as I have, are also being paid serious attention in recent times. Sonia Boyce, Veronica Ryan, Claudette Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Ingrid Pollard and many others. It’s amazing to see that. Society has shifted, and their art is being looked at differently compared to the 1980s when they were starting their careers, even though some of the work that’s celebrated now was actually created back then. I’m interested in the massive sculptures in your Tate Modern exhibition. Was that a new move for you?ZM: The sculptures came from Paris, and Paris has its own past. They were being displayed in Jardin des Tuileries, the public gardens next to Le Louvre, before they came to Tate. In places like that, you don’t often have a sculpture of a living Black person. You have beautiful public sculptures in the UK, but how often do we find ourselves represented in that manner?BE: Well, we’re only starting to see them now. The sculpture of yourself in the exhibition is just incredible, so monumental. The idea of having life-sized sculptures of Black women in particular is something that’s gaining ground, with other artists such as Simone Leigh in America. The impact is incredibly powerful. So finally, can you tell me a bit about what’s coming up next?ZM: Currently, I have three exhibitions running at the same time — in San Francisco, LA and London. But I have this creative block. I don’t know how authors deal with this kind of block.BE: How long has the block lasted?ZM: It’s been six months now.BE: Sometimes it just means that you need to rest. Rather than seeing it as a negative, perhaps it’s just a fallow period for recovery before your imagination and your energy return. I never used the term “writer’s block” ever, because I feel like if I name it, it really does materialise. I just think that other things are going on in my life which means that work has stalled for a bit. When you have a creative life, it’s still there, it’s just percolating. And it will come back, probably with a massive amount of energy, because you’ve had a rest, a break.ZM: If you say so! [Laughs]BE: [Laughs] Also you’ve had so much attention that it might feel like pressure. But you’ve got so much integrity in terms of your art, and that’s what will keep you going. I teach creative writing — I have done for a very long time — and I say to people when they are stalling, don’t think about it, just do it. Just do the technical work of writing, in this case, and you will work through whatever issues you have.ZM: Yeah. No, I’m unable to. You know, touching a camera is like — I don’t know. It’s just hard these days. I didn’t touch the camera today. I didn’t touch the camera yesterday. I carried the camera over the weekend, but I didn’t use it.BE: Oh, interesting. And you’re used to having it with you all the time?ZM: Yeah. There was a time when I was so excited, I just wanted to be there and just to do it.BE: Yeah. You know, with the camera, just lock it up and say, “OK, I’m not going to use you for another six months.” And then when six months is up, go there and you’ll be excited again.ZM: [Laughs]BE: Deprive yourself of it, in order to generate that enthusiasm and excitement again.ZM: OK, I’ll try and I’ll let you know. I’ll say, “Hey Bernardine, I’m back at it!” You will see the results.BE: I’m sure. I have no doubts. “Zanele Muholi” is at Tate Modern, London, until January 26 2025Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
