South African photographer Zanele Muholi: ‘My mother worked for a white family. I remember the pools I wasn’t allowed to swim in’ | Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi has been named the winner of the 2026 Hasselblad award. The South African artist, who identifies as non-binary, now takes their place throughout the pantheon of the world’s best artwork photographers, from Carrie Mae Weems, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans and Sophie Calle all the way in which again to the forebears of the artwork kind, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams.

It’s the form of accolade that codifies the breathless reception with which Muholi’s work has been heralded so far. When their 2020 survey present at London’s Tate Modern was stymied by pandemic customer restrictions, the gallery introduced it again 4 years later. One critic likened their arresting self-portraits to Rembrandt’s.

Muholi isn’t swayed by a lot, and doesn’t see the award as a win. “I can’t say it’s winning, because that’s like you entered a competition,” they are saying. “This is more a recognition, that is a dream for most of us who are doing photography or who are visualising a work that is not often recognised. It’s an honour for our people, for the Black LGBTQIA+ community from home – it’s for all of us, the queer and trans community in Africa.”

That the artist ought to greet this type of private profession excessive with a “we” speaks volumes in regards to the beating coronary heart of their oeuvre. Muholi has spent practically 30 years not simply documenting the individuals they love, however commissioning, empowering, supporting, educating: working, for and with the collective. “I’m made by the community. I’m shaped by women, who are the forces in all that I do. I move with the community, with or without resources, with or without recognition. It’s how it has been. I love my people. I love being part of movements, because that’s where we heal, really. It never makes sense to me to be alone.”

Muholi was born in 1972 within the township of Umlazi, south-west of Durban within the province of KwaZulu-Natal, at one of many bloodiest moments of apartheid. The artist was 4 when the 1976 Soweto rebellion noticed schoolchildren take to the streets, in protest in opposition to being compelled to check in Afrikaans; as many as 1,000 have been killed by the top of the yr. Muholi was simply beginning major faculty when the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was tortured to loss of life in 1977.

Muholi’s mom, Bester, would have turned 90 this yr. She was a home employee for 40 years, usually dwelling away from residence. “I remember being at home without my mother, because she was working for a white family. The image I remember is of her being at workplaces with swimming pools I wasn’t allowed to swim in, and her reminding me: ‘Don’t go close, because it’s work and it won’t be good for my Madam to see you.’ I remember the dogs that were trained to bite Black people. I remember the different beaches, the north for the white people, the south for Black people.”

Muholi additionally remembers the challenges round their education, the segregated Bantu training “that led me to being nowhere, and how I so much wanted to go to Durban Girls and I couldn’t qualify because there was no one to guarantee that the school fees would be paid in time”.

Where lazy or unthinking descriptions will usually land on “poor” to qualify a background resembling Muholi’s, the artist purposefully chooses as a substitute “under-resourced,” thereby underscoring the systemic inequalities at work. They additionally emphasise what they’ve gained at each stage: a DIY urgency – a way of accountability – to maintain making work, pushed by the certitude that it actually can change lives. As a baby Muholi was cared for by aunties and neighbours, and the broader township group. This sense of belonging to a constructed, chosen household is itself expanded all through their work.

Their longrunning portrait sequence, Faces and Phases, paperwork professionals and consultants who play essential roles within the queer group. Lerato Dumse (KwaThema Springs Johannesburg), shot in 2010, depicts Muholi’s former producer, whom they describe as “my child / my niece / my friend, someone that I have spent most of my creative time with”. Most importantly, although, Dumse is a photojournalist in her personal proper. Muholi’s skill to seize an individual’s presence is outstanding.

“I always ask people to look good,” they are saying, “because most images that were done previously by visual anthropologists, they really distorted Africa. You often find that the photographer’s name is there but the person being photographed, their name is not there. I’m trying to fix that and make sure that we are done beautifully in the most amazing way.”

In 2007, Muholi shot a sequence of portraits of Miss D’Vine, a dancer who labored within the homosexual bars and drag homes of Johannesburg. Muholi was intrigued by how these performers have been cultural activists with out realizing that they have been: “Their performances make people happy; it changes lives for those who thought that they were alone.”

Shooting Miss D’Vine outdoor, utilizing the panorama, was about “undoing the closet” and permitting the topic to be seen. In one picture, the dancer wears a beaded isigege, a Zulu maiden’s skirt historically worn by younger ladies through the Reed Dance, after they dance for the Zulu king. “Trans people have not been able to be part of those ceremonies because they are either pre-op, and therefore they don’t qualify, or if they do go there, they might be seen as something else that they do not connect with.”

Muholi duly treasures this picture, shot on movie, for a lot of causes, not least as a result of it is likely one of the few to have survived the brutal housebreaking of greater than 20 exhausting drives of their work from their residence in Cape Town in 2012. The thieves left behind a number of costly objects (a TV, a printer, a projector, a digicam), main the artist to suspect a homophobic motive.

Muholi was not cowed, nevertheless. “We are a growing nation,” they mentioned at the time. “There is a struggle that needs to be fought here.” Losing that work couldn’t grow to be an excuse to cease working: “I have a responsibility. I have a duty.”

Somnyama Ngonyama is a sequence of self-portraits, lots of that are impressed by Muholi’s mom. In them the artist poses in daring apparel: right here a headdress of a dozen combs or two-dozen wood garments pegs; there a headwrap and neckpiece product of deflated bike tires. The photos ask sharp questions on conventions of magnificence and trend: “What is beauty to you might not be the same to the next person. What is fashion in the west might be ritual to us, or part of the culture and traditions of the Bantu people.”

The sequence’ title means “Hail the Dark Lioness” in Muholi’s mom tongue, isiZulu. “The naming is political,” says Muholi. Photography is commonly held to be a western factor. “But when we think, when we plan, when we produce, when we play our music, it is in Zulu – or whatever your native language is.”

In “Julile”, which interprets as “the one who thinks deeply”, the artist lies bare on a rug clasping to their physique plastic baggage blown up like silken balloons. The pose attracts the traditional curves of a wonderful nude in opposition to a backdrop of piled-up newspapers. “This was in my lounge, a few days before I had an operation to remove fibroids. I was in a state, counting down the days before that big operation, thinking deeply of what was about to come and how my body was to change for worse or the better. It made me think about sexuality and illnesses and the sicknesses that consume us. When you have fibroids, it’s like something in your blood is consumed by these forces that live within your body, caused by trauma or stress. So I was thinking deeply about the sense of self and belonging and about existence, you know – my experience, my pain, my survival.”

When organising Ntozakhe II (Parktown), Muholi was occupied with the Statue of Liberty and improvised a headdress out of a pair of denims, then used hair buns because the crown. “‘Ntozakhe’ could be ‘your precious belonging’,” Muholi says. “It’s the main cover of my book. For every beautiful Black girl to be a cover is an honour. I’m surprised when I look at myself – I want to connect but disconnect at the same time because as I photographed myself, I never thought this image would become this iconic, having seen images of Black women captured by other people.”

As painful and vile because the previous is, Muholi sees her digicam as a weapon and pictures, a accountability, “to change whatever is unjust towards our bodies, ourselves”.

Zanele Muholi is the winner of the 2026 Hasselblad award. Their work can be on view on the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, from 10 October.