Zwelethu Mthethwa (born 1960, Durban, South Africa) photographed pre-adolescent and teenage boys in KwaZulu-Natal in 2010. The boys are adherents to the doctrines of a branch of the charismatic Shembe Nazareth Baptist Church. Mthethwa named this photograph series “The Brave Ones”. He has specialized in photo-essays of sometimes-marginalized people in South Africa’s “Townships”, including migrant workers, miners and sugarcane harvesters.
Zanele Muholi (born 1972, Umlazi, South Africa) is a lesbian photographer and “visual activist”. Among numerous projects, she has documented the lives of South African lesbians, some of whom have suffered from persecution and violence.
ZP_Nhlanhla Esther Mofokeng, Thokoza, Johannesburg_© Zanele Muholi_2010
ZP_Anelisa Mfo Nyanga, Cape Town_© Zanele Muholi_2010
ZP_Martin Machapa_photograph © Zanele Muholi
ZP_Rotimi Fani-Kayode_Untitled, 1987_Rotimi Fani-Kayode was born in 1955 in Lagos, Nigeria, and he died of an AIDS-related heart attack in London, England, in 1989. Of photography he said: “It is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography therefore — Black, African, homosexual photography — which I must use not just as an instrument but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms.”
ZP_Rotimi Fani-Kayode_Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience)_1989
ZP_Rotimi Fani-Kayode_Every Moment Counts II_1989
ZP_Rotimi Fani-Kayode_Tulip Boy_1989
ZP_La femme américaine libérée des années 70_© Samuel Fosso (as both photographer and model)_1997. Samuel Fosso was born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon. At the age of 12 he began to work as an assistant to a portrait photographer. By the end of his teens he had his own studio where he frequently shot self-portraits, many of them fanciful or referencing famous figures in Black popular culture.
ZP_Samuel Fosso_From the series Autoportraits des années 70_Selfportrait as Angela Davis
ZP_Samuel Fosso_From the series Autoportraits des années 70_a teenaged selfportrait as himself 2
ZP_Samuel Fosso_From the series Autoportraits des années 70_a teenaged selfportrait as himself 1
