Faces and Phases (2006-2014) Analysis

At the time of this essay’s completion, George Floyd had not yet been murdered, his death had not yet incited the reconstitution of the Black Lives Matter movement and decolonization was a trendy academic topic and not a necessity for institutional change against mass-oppression. I hope it reminds everyone that, while art is a powerful instrument to communicate political messages and enact change, it has also been used a tool to oppress Black, non-Western and non-binary bodies. We must do better to identify where we have fallen short and instead establish a more progressive, representative curriculum.

Zanele Muholi’s seminal photographic series Faces and Phases (2006-2014) is a dynamic representation of the black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ+) community in South Africa. Muholi has created a series that grants visibility to a group forced to the margins of society on account of racial and sexual differences. By choosing to represent the black, queer community of South Africa, Muholi in equal measure appropriates and subverts earlier precedents that form the colonial archive, which worked to oppress non-Western bodies through the medium of photography. Faces and Phases adopts a sense of parody to form a more inclusive archive that subverts colonial tradition— one that aims to trace, collect and remember the black members of the South African LGBTQ+ community.

The historical archive

To fully understand the ideological and visual influences behind Faces and Phases, it is necessary to discuss the construction of archival tradition at the inception of photographic technologies and its implications for the social body. Notably, the pseudoscience of eugenics has been historically linked to the documentation and analysis of various facial and physiognomic characteristics, perpetuating racist myths in the process.

Allan Sekula argues that nineteenth-century governments were able to institute structured systems of difference by citing photographic images as evidence of various physiognomic traits. Further, the photographs defined an essentialized typology of “the Other,” marked by racial or class divisions. This photographic practice was replicated in the British African colonies, where the power structure of dominant photographer and passive photographic subject reached its peak. Leona Farber recounts the organization of power in the process of photography, wherein the authoritative, European photographer ‘scientifically’ documented their black subjects in an attempt to record southern African ‘types.’

Through these photos, colonial Europeans visually communicated the dichotomy of racial and class difference in the time of imperialism— an issue that Muholi appropriates and subverts in Faces and Phases by allowing their participants to exercise individuality. In doing so, Muholi exposes the imperial obsession with ethnography and reverses its effects on their participants, producing a dialogue between colonial and contemporary archives.

The archival aspect of Faces and Phases

Important to the colonial archive is the authentic appearance of pseudo-scientific discourse, which dictates the visual strategies employed in photographic style. Sekula reveals the classificatory tone that Alphonse Bertillon produced in his work, differentiating ‘deviant, racial or lower-class’ traits from normative ones. Bertillon’s framing, lighting, grid-like arrangement and subject gaze contribute to the apparently objective representation of his physiognomic images. Not confronted with a direct gaze, the viewer is free to ‘objectively’ analyze Bertillon’s eugenic ‘evidence,’ concealing the performed quality of the archive.

To undermine the work of Bertillon among others, Muholi champions an inter-subjective mode of subject-object relations by parodying his visual language. The black-and-white color choice in an age of digital color photography is a deliberate one that places Faces and Phases in the context of the archive. Moreover, the widespread use of a high white-exposure and grid-like display when exhibited references colonial precedents. The similarities end there, however. Muholi’s participants all look directly to the camera, unsettling the oppressive gaze of the viewer as the participants reclaim agency.  The developments in Faces and Phases allude to Bertillon’s earlier photographic approach, but Muholi’s stylistic decisions foreground the previously obscured performativity of the colonial archive.

Faces and Phases not only engages with the historical archive, but it also looks to the future, creating an archive for posterity. As Muholi has asserted, the lack of black, queer representation is their primary motivation behind Faces and Phases.[6] Further, various scholars have suggested that the desire to record the black, queer existence is deeply rooted in the high death rate from crime and disease. Kylie Thomas speaks to the correlation between HIV/AIDS and the absence of queer representation in particular when she examines the process of mourning.

Faces and Phases is especially pertinent to the discourse of disease and mourning. Applying Thomas’ approach to the documentation of queer lives, Faces and Phases can be seen as an archive that provides not only visibility but also commemoration of black LGBTQ-identifying South Africans. The indexical nature of the photographic medium allows Muholi to ground the lives of their participants in reality, which allows their participants to be remembered in death.

Conclusion

Zanele Muholi engaged with the colonial archive to expose discrepancies regarding the ethnographic representation of imperial subjects in their photographic series Faces and Phases. Colonial archives have shown how the photographic medium was used as an instrument of oppression. Consequently, Muholi appropriated various aesthetic strategies engrained in these examples that documented pseudo-scientific practices, dismantling the underlying ideologies of the colonial archive through a visual and linguistic re-structuring of the photographic process. Through aesthetic and linguistic references to historical precedents, Muholi reveals a gap in photographic archives and rectifies the situation in such a way that simultaneously exposes historical power relations and celebrates racial and sexual diversity.

Sources

Farber, Leora. “Beyond the Ethnographic Turn: Refiguring the Archive in Selected Works by Zanele Muholi,” in Critical Arts: A South-North Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 31, no. 2 (April 2017): 12-27. DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2017.1345973.

Firstenberg, Lauri. “Representing the Body Archivally in South African Photography,” in Art Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 58-67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778168.

Muholi, Zanele and Willis, Deborah. “Zanele Muholi Faces & Phases: Conversation with Deborah Willis,” in Aperture 218 (Spring 2015): 58-64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24475138.

Salley, Raél Jero. “Zanele Muholi's Elements of Survival,” in African Arts 45, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 58-69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41721405.

Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive,” in October 39, (Winter 1986): 3-64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778312.

Thomas, Kylie. Impossible Mourning : HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid. (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2014).