Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness

“These feel like images you might have dreamed, both of the kind that slip away and the ones you manage to keep tenuously in your grasp, slippery, otherworldly. . . . Before our eyes, Zanele Muholi transforms into a mother, a domestic worker, an Afrofuturist, an oracle. It’s fiction and it is not.”—Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is the long-awaited monograph from one of the most powerful visual activists of our time. The book features over ninety of Muholi’s evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholi’s immediate environment. A powerfully arresting collection of work, Muholi’s radical statements of identity, race, and resistance are a direct response to contemporary and historical racisms. As Muholi states, “I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified. . . . To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.” With more than twenty written contributions from curators, poets, and authors, alongside luxurious tritone reproductions of Muholi’s images, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness is as much a manifesto of resistance as it is an autobiographical, artistic statement.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 212
Number of images: 100
Publication date: 2018-08-15
Measurements: 10.5 x 14 x 0.9 inches
ISBN: 9781597114240

“The first thing to note about Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness is that it begins before you open it. The striking cover portrait itself—“Ntozakhe II, Parktown, Johannesburg,” from 2016—demands ample time to be taken in…This is how the book starts on you, its front and back cover working together to prepare you for what lies within. A hint at its insides.”—Yrsa Daley-Ward, The New York Times Book Review