The history of African nude photography is complex and intertwined with colonialism, power dynamics, and representation. This article delves into the ethical considerations surrounding this genre, exploring the perspectives of both the photographers and the subjects, and examining the legacy of historical exploitation.
Zanele Muholi: A Visual Activist
Everything about Zanele Muholi’s art is political. The aesthetic - the colours, the composition, the light - is political. The individuals depicted, elevated by and enveloped in those aesthetics, are also political. Being political may not have been what Muholi, their photographs and their subjects chose, yet historical and contemporary discrimination, which wrote and continues to write them out of history has rendered them so, forcing them to reclaim their narrative from those who have co-opted and denied it.
“I consider myself a visual activist first and foremost because my work has a political agenda,” writes Muholi, the Black, Queer, non-binary visual activist, who takes the pronouns they, them and their. Before the lockdown regulations came into effect, Muholi was due to open a solo exhibition and first UK mid-career survey at Tate Modern, London. This was postponed before finally going ahead earlier this year, and now it reopens at the Gropius Bau in Berlin as the artist’s first major survey in Germany.
Born in 1972 in the township of Umlazi, Muholi grew up at the height of apartheid - a system of racial segregation in South Africa, formally implemented by the white minority regime in 1948. The government justified apartheid as a means to maintain peace and stability. In reality, it represented the continuation of the country’s colonisation by Dutch and British powers at the start of the 17th century, and the subsequent discrimination and repression of the Black population.
The government enforced countless racially-motivated, segregationist policies and laws to repress Black communities, such as the establishment of Bantustans - 10 territories where the majority of the Black population was moved and further separated according to a state-assigned ethnic group. There were also pass laws, which required Black people to present identity documents detailing both race and gender when moving outside of their designated area.
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In 1994, internal unrest and external pressure from the international community resulted in the formation of a new constitution and the election of a bi-racial coalition government, with Nelson Mandela as President. This marked the official end of apartheid. The government began work to address the social and economic legacy of apartheid: poverty, inequality, education and infrastructure.
Even the sphere of sexuality was subject to the government’s compulsion to control during the apartheid era, both in relation to race and sexual orientation. The Morality Act of 1957, for instance, criminalised interracial relationships and homosexuality. In 1996, however, the post-apartheid constitution became the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.
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“I picked up the camera because there were no images of us that spoke to me at the time when I needed them the most.
ART | Zanele Muholi depicts her journey as an artist, visual activist
Aftermath
Despite radical and progressive changes at a legislative level, discrimination against Blacks and the LGBTQIA+ community, especially its Black lesbian, trans and intersex members, continued throughout the country with a significant gulf between the commitment of the law and lived reality. The struggle against systematic racism and discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community share a complicated past, which extends into the present.
LGBTQ activist groups began to form during apartheid, but the disconnect between racial tensions and sexual discrimination fractured the concurrent struggles for Black and LGBTQIA+ rights. It was not until the 1980s that multiracial lesbian and gay activist organisations emerged. Today, the enduring impact of apartheid, both economically and socially, and ongoing sexual discrimination, continue to impact the lives of Black LGBTQIA+ South Africans particularly.
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Muholi studied on the Advanced Photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newton, Johannesburg in 2003, followed by an MA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto, in 2009. When they began taking photos, there was a critical lack of scholarship, including visual representations, of the LGBTQIA+ community and particularly its Black members in South Africa. But Muholi was not interested in waiting to become someone else’s subject, regardless of how well-intentioned their work and attempts at representation may have been. Instead, they worked, and continue to work, to reclaim, write and re-write the troubled and repressed history of their community, for which Muholi has become an activist, archivist and witness.
“Muholi’s work entered into a void of representation when it came to presenting positive imagery of Black Queer lives in South Africa,” explains Sarah Allen, the former assistant curator of International Art and co-curator of the exhibition at Tate Modern, alongside Dr Yasufumi Nakamori, senior curator of International Art (Photography). “Muholi is responding to a lack of visual evidence of their life and their reality in post-apartheid South Africa.
Dichotomies run through Muholi’s visual history: tensions that reflect the LGBTQIA+ community’s difficult past and present, in South Africa and beyond it. These dichotomies - between the individual and collective, celebration and mourning, joy and pain, power and vulnerability - appear to various degrees and in different incarnations throughout their many projects.
Ethical Considerations in African Nude Photography
Ethnographic photographs are a valuable resource for researchers and publics. Yet these images raise a range of ethical issues. Public display of particular sorts of images can cause offense and reproduce colonial positionality, attitudes and assumptions that anti-racist and decolonizing agendas need to address.
The Powell-Cotton sisters took a very large number of photographs while travelling in Angola and Namibia in the 1930s. This archive is of great importance to researchers and those interested in the history and culture of the region. The Making African Connections project wants to make the collection as accessible as possible.
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Images of Nudity
The archive collection includes pictures of women and girls whose breasts are not covered. While many of these women would have considered themselves fully clothed at the time they were taken, we know some were asked to remove clothes in order to look more authentically African. We cannot know which specific photographs this applies to. Who has the right to decide whether to place these images of women and girls in the public gaze by digitizing them and providing access online?
The UK-based Project Team decided it was inappropriate for us to do so. We have made the existence of the photographs visible to researchers, but the images themselves are hidden from public view. The World Wide Web provides millions of people with access to cultural knowledge from across the globe. This is a public good. But the Web is also a place where images, objects and people can easily be displaced from their context and subject to a gaze which has harmful intent, and where concepts like ‘adult nudity’ are shaped by the socially conservative policies and practices of North American social media companies.
And so our choice of technology (the Web) adds further encouragement for us to act as censors. Similarly, but in response more to ethical than socio-technological drivers, photographs which include moments that we believe to be private or which the written archive suggests were taken only after considerable persuasion have also not been made available.
Physical Type Photography
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, anthropologists photographed individuals they met from the front and the side to try and create a physical typology of people. This practice deliberately erased personal narratives, asking people to instead represent a type, in line with contemporary ideas of race. This practice was generally considered dated, obsolete and unprofessional by anthropologists in the 1930s but many of the Powell-Cotton sisters’ photographs are taken in this manner.
The Making African Connections project is able only to digitise a tiny fraction of the photographs in the Powell-Cotton archive, so we have chosen to focus on those photographs that contain individuals we can name and provide some biographical information about.
In early-2021, Temi Odumosu's 2020 article "The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons" came to my attention.
Naked Black Bodies as Symbols of Beauty and Resistance
Naked Black bodies are not new to American history or art. From images of captured Africans chained on slave ships or being violated at slave auctions to magazine and movie images portraying the tribal attire of certain African tribes as the nakedness of immoral savages, the Black body exposed like chattel is well documented.
What is relatively new in Western culture is the portrayal of naked Black bodies as symbols of beauty, art and culture, willing vulnerability, and motivators of social justice. These are the portrayals that can awaken and inspire to action any individual, especially individuals committed to social justice and/or to being people who put faith into action. This also is the art that can empower, inspire, and in both conscious and unconscious ways have a positive impact on the self-image of Black women of all ages.
When the portrayals of Black bodies in photographs and paintings are used in these ways, they become acts of moral agency. They become acts in which the artist is challenging and broadening the way we view what is normal, appropriate, and ethical.
The visual artist Renee Cox is an example of a moral agent under constraint. She is a Black female who creates and exhibits works in which Black bodies, including naked Black female bodies, are beautiful, strong, and empowering for women of color. Cox has often used self-portraiture to bring social justice issues to the public’s awareness and remembrance.
By viewing her works, each of us can experience the ways in which visual art as resistance can educate and empower us. Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper in which she reworks Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper is one illustration of the ways in which Cox has called awareness to the lack of positive Black female images in expressions of Christianity and challenged people to envision Christ in ways beyond what I call the Swedish Jesus, the pale White male with wavy blond hair and blue eyes that hangs on many local church walls, including local churches whose members are predominately people of color.
The Swedish Jesus and a few dark-haired similarities have become the standard representation of Jesus of Nazareth and of the Christ. Other male versions, for example with a Black, Latino, or Asian male, are in circulation but are often viewed as being alternatives to the real Jesus and for some Christians are deemed inappropriate or even heretical.
Cox has taken the risk of replacing Leonardo da Vinci’s version of Jesus with that of a Black nude female. In numerous instances, Cox has consciously made a decision to create and exhibit photography that exposes historical and contemporary racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. She believes that as an artist, it is her responsibility to do so.
In a 2015 presentation, Cox stated, “I want change. I think as artists we have it in our power to maybe make a little bit of change. I accept it as a responsibility.” Cox has made these decisions in spite of the constraints placed and attempted to be placed on her as an individual of African descent, as a woman, and as an artist.
Womanist thought intentionally incorporates a broad range of viewpoints in seeking human equality, mutual respect, and love of all life. Thus, it is not surprising that womanist definitions of moral agency also are diverse.
