“For the longest time, I resisted the label of artist,” the photographer Zanele Muholi said on a recent video call from Durban, South Africa. “I called myself a visual activist, because of the agenda I was pushing at the time — which I am still pushing, even now.” Since the early 2000s, Muholi, 48, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” has documented the Black South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (L.G.B.T.I.) experience.
Although South Africa was the first country in the world to enshrine the rights of lesbian and gay people in its 1996 constitution, social attitudes in the years after apartheid often lagged behind legal protections. “I needed to have those visual conversations,” Muholi said.