curate:

Zanele has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to replace her equipment – PLEASE watch the video and donate what you can

I”ve lost all the work I produced from 2008 – 2012. Also backups were stolen.
I thought of the day I spoke with another friend about alternative storage. Now it is too late.
I feel like a breathing zombie right now.
I don’t even know where to start. I’m wasted.
I’ve sent out a note to friends to tell them about the incident.

The person/s got access to the flat via the toilet window, broke the burglar guard and got away with my cameras, lenses, memory cards and external hard drives, laptop, cellphones…
Whoever ransacked the place got away with more than 20 external hard drives with the most valuable content I’ve ever produced

I am hoping that a few of my good friends are willing to go to pawn shops or to other places where this type of equipment is sold. I do not even want to know who the thief is.

Campaign to replace Zanele Muholi’s stolen photography equipment

On the 28th April, Zanele returned home from Seoul, South Korea to discover that all her work between 2008 and 2012 stored on 20 hard drives and including backups had been stolen on the 20th. The thieves also stole her cameras, lens, memory sticks and laptops. There are no words to describe Zanele’s feelings at this time as an entire original archive of Black queer lesbian history has been destroyed and that impacts on all of us – makes invisible what Zanele has worked so hard to make visible and speak of through her photography. via blacklooks

(via derica)

(via absolutearts.com)

Renée Cox, The Discreet Charm of the Bougies - Missy At Home (detail), 2008.

possibilitiesof:

Hottentot Venus 2000

Lyle Ashton Harris & Renee Valerie Cox 1995

comment by Cox;

“This reclaiming of the image of the Hottentot Venus is a way of exploring my own psychic identification with the image at the level of spectacle. I am playing with what it means to be an African diasporic artist  producing and selling work in a culture that is by and large narcissistically mired in the debasement and objectification of blackness.  And yet, I see my work less as a didactic critique and more as an interrogation of the ambivalence around the body.” [source]

William Yang has documented the gay scene in Sydney since the 1970s. At this time many were celebrating new-found freedom, greater acceptance in society and the start of the Mardi Gras parades. In these images from the 1990s Yang investigates the impact of AIDS on his friends and community, as well as the broader social implications of the disease. The works act as memorials which acknowledge both individual fears, the illnesses that AIDS and HIV bring, the repercussions on the gay community, and the importance of public displays of recognition and remembrance.

Darrin and Linden (part 3), (1991, printed circa 1992) by William Yang

Text reads: “They showed me a Herb Ritts photo that they liked. The two men in it were in a stylised pose and they were naked. Could I do for them something like that? I explained I couldn’t reproduce the pace as that would be too difficult, moreover it was imitation, but I got the idea of what they wanted. They wanted sexy shots, but they wanted them artistic, definitely nothing pornographic. You see, they were madly in love.”

(via William Yang: Life Lines- Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art)

William Yang - William in scholar’s costume, 1984

text on photo reads: I learned Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and this led me to embracing my Chinese heritage which hitherto had been denied and unacknowledged. People at the time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description, as there was a certain zealousness to the process. But now, I see it as a liberation from racial suppression, and prefer to say that I came out as Chinese.

(via William Yang – The Art of Seduction | Iris Prize Short List 2011)

William Yang, The Art of Seduction Doco. 2010. Dir. Craig Boreham  [image ‘Alpha’ by by William Yang, Brisbane late 60’s]

William Yang is a third-generation Australian-Chinese artist whose work examines his Chinese family history and gay identity. This documentary looks at one aspect of William’s work as a photographer - male nudes - the most personal and vulnerable of his work because it always involves a negotiation or transaction.

Best known as a photographer addressing images of feminity in a male-oriented society, Miwa Yanagi has over the past year produced a tea ceremony at Kyoto Art Center, Sakuramori; an interactive “old-maid” café …and her latest project, the performance trilogy 1924, investigating the social and cultural impact of Japan’s rapid modernization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

via Miwa Yanagi

(via La Lettre de la Photographie)

‘My Godfather blessing and evoking my name to the 4 directions in front of the sea …Ecuador 2010’ Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira: Other Stories series

(via La Lettre de la Photographie)

‘Finding what he hides, 1993’ Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira: Other Stories series

via La Lettre de la Photographie

‘Mom always trying to keep me close since 1983’ Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira: Other Stories series.

via Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira: Other Stories 

‘Mom healing me from my fear of iguanas, by taking me to the park and feeding them every weekend, en. 1994‘  Karen Miranda-Rivadeneira

According to my research, the act of remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. The more we “remember” an event the more we are likely to change it with time.

Departing from this thought, I began questioning the role of photography and its relationship to memory, specifically what it intends to preserve. Since 2008, I have been working on Other Stories / Historias Bravas, a project where I revisit events from my youth that were never recorded. In this project, I re-stage scenarios taken from my memory and with the collaboration of my immediate family I recreate these memories.

Although, staged, this project is not meant to convey a romanticized vision of my experiences; rather they are meant to provide a means for reflection and a search for truthfulness.

“Trying to find ways to do lovemaking pics”

Tee A. Corinne has created a large and lasting body of photographs of lesbian eroticism. She was a revolutionary, she did what no one had done before her – she made erotic art for lesbians from a lesbian perspective. “Every new generation of lesbian photographers who follow her look back on her work as some sort of norm – the basic lesbian photograph.

The feminist movement argued that heterosexuality and hence erotic art objectifies women, thus it became increasingly difficult for feminist artists to deal with sexuality in their work. Tee A. Corinne found several ways to deal with the problem of representing lesbian sexuality. To avoid the male gaze, she either used specific techniques to create abstract or metaphoric images, or she insisted that sexually explicit work was only displayed in women-only exhibitions and publications.

In 1982, Tee A. Corinne produced a large series called “Yantras of Womanlove”. While these photographs are explicit, Corinne used the technique of arranging multiple prints into yantras to camouflage their outspokenness. Apart from that, she was also concerned for the models’ privacy. Thus she created abstract images of lesbian sexuality by using several techniques, such as solarisation, flipped negatives, images printed in negative and multiple exposures. These heavily manipulated images function not only as a protection for the individual model’s identity, but also as a correlative for the status of the public lesbian: present yet invisible, out yet hidden, provocative yet in need of protection

via Tee A. Corinne

(via Tee A. Corinne)

MAKING RELATIONSHIPS VISIBLE

In 1975, the year in which I most fully came out, I started making self-portraits that combined my own image with that of a lover. Photographer Honey Lee Cottrell (see Nothing But The Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image) was my beloved at that time, and together we explored ways to make images that ìreadî as lesbian. In some of these pictures, I am nude and she is partially clothed. In one, I have my hand on her thigh and am looking into the camera as she looks at me.

insaniyat:

Imagine a dream.
Eyes closed, Mouths open, as if in a dream. Standing facing us with their backs to the darkness, they sing, soundless; they have been standing here, singing for themselves for a long time, imagining us, hearing. Standing, facing days of tedium, facing a world that has adorned them with a false crown.
Standing, waiting.

For ‘Listen’, a project inspired by Newsha Tavakolian’s childhood dream to become a singer, she made six studio portraits of professional women singers, who are not allowed to sing solo, perform in public or produce CD’s in Iran because of Islamic tenets.

Inspired by her feelings about her society, she made six extra images, which are also imaginary album covers with titles for the singers. As a statement, the CD cases are left empty.

The works are accompanied by a video installation with silent clips of the women singers performing. 

Check out the rest of the collection here via azaadi

(Source: , via globalvoices)

(via STEVENSON | Sabelo Mlangeni)

Sabelo Mlangeni, Iduku 2007

Black Men in Dress comprises a series of portraits photographed at the Johannesburg and Soweto Pride, a yearly event for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) community. These portraits remind Mlangeni of a childhood where, as he describes:

[M]ost communities had what we call ‘uSis’bhuti’. This is a term used to describe a boy who behaves like a girl. Why then do we hate these boys when they have grown up to be men who dress as women? Why do we turn and call them names, pretending that we’ve never seen it? These are some of the issues I try to bring to the fore in this series.

As in Mlangeni’s previous series Country Girls, a dramatic sense of fashion and a performative and playful manner is explored by gay men to engage with their sense of belonging and identity.