Zanele Muholi, Vredehoek Cape Town 2011
Faces And Phases 2006-14 looks like it’s been a long-term labour of love for the South African artist Zanele Muholi. The exhibition of selected portraits at the Photographer’s Gallery which launched the book (and builds on a previous edition of five years ago) in London was a moving testament to life and loss and the defiance of the queer people she has captured over the last eight years. A necessary and political creation, the book and the images are unsettling because we know that some of the women and trans men featured might now be dead. The uncertainty about which of the people in the images have suffered the horror of rape and/or death, or repeated abuse or rejection, give the work more power still. This is a legacy, a record of lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans lives that confronts culturally dominant imagery and storytelling.