“I am because of you, Mother Earth”: Zanele Muholi’s call for images and texts where “you cannot tell where the body ends and the land begins”

Behind the upcoming Der Greif issue 19 guest edited by Zanele Muholi and supported by Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung

For decades, perhaps since its inception, traditional documentary photography has operated on extraction, entering marginalized spaces to record suffering before leaving the story framed by an outside gaze. In the upcoming Der Greif Issue 19, guest editor and world-renowned South African visual activist Zanele Muholi shatters this paradigm entirely. Muholi wants to transform the magazine into a "shared ecosystem," a collective space where photography is weaponized for self-representation, intimacy, and historical preservation.

In a profound dialogue with our Editor Ilaria Sponda, Muholi maps out a radical redefinition of "the environment." Moving far beyond pristine landscapes and Western nostalgia for the wilderness, Muholi roots their vision in the African philosophy of Ubuntu, the lived practice of “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” ("a person is a person through other persons"). To Muholi, the environment is not a backdrop; it is an extension of our own flesh. The history of the Earth is inextricably bound to the history of the Black body, carrying the scars of colonial extraction, forced migration, and ancestral blood.

By deliberately breaking conventional brackets collapsing the hierarchies between the Global North and South, uniting fifteen-year-old dreamers with seventy-year-old activists, and bleeding the boundaries of photography into performance and ritual, Issue 19 issues an urgent challenge to its audience. It demands a confrontation with political ecology. From the rural landscapes of South Africa to global struggles for visibility, this issue aims to bring together a network of authors who refuse erasure, proving that to defend the land, we must defend the marginalized bodies who inhabit it. Apply (https://site.picter.com/der-greif-issue-19) until June 20, 2026 to participate in this claim for the land as a shared body and legal entity themselves.

Ilaria Sponda: You define yourself as a "visual activist." In your own words, how does visual activism differ from traditional documentary photography, especially when it comes to bringing visibility to South Africa’s Black LGBTQIA+ communities?

Zanele Muholi: For me, visual activism is not merely about taking a picture of a person and walking away. Traditional documentary photography often operates on extraction: the photographer enters a community, takes what they need, and leaves the story framed by their own gaze, their own benefit. Visual activism means you are inside the struggle, you are of the community, and the camera is a tool to co-create, to affirm life, not just to record suffering. When I photograph my people, Black LGBTQIA+ bodies in South Africa, I’m saying: you exist, you are beautiful, you deserve to be seen in your fullness, your resistance, your love, your pleasure. It is not enough to show the wound; we must show the joy, the intimacy, the survival. Visual activism insists on agency. My participants are not subjects; they are collaborators. Together, we are writing ourselves into history from a space of power, not victimhood. We are saying: we refuse to be defined solely by the violence enacted upon us. We are here, we have always been here, and we will not be erased.

IS: Looking back, was there a specific moment or encounter that made you realize photography could be understood as a form of empowerment to confront prejudice, stereotypes, and violence?

ZM: Yes, there was a moment, but it is not singular; it is a series of losses and urges that made the camera a necessity. I held the camera after the death of a dear friend, a Black lesbian woman, who was murdered. The media came, took images of the scene, and left. And I asked: where is her dignity? Who will show who she was, her smile, her softness, her strength? I started because I was tired of our stories being told by others, often with sensationalism or pity. But I also remember photographing my own mother when she was ill. I wanted to hold her image before she transitioned. Photography became a means to hold onto those I love, to make visible what this country wanted to disappear. Every time I raise my camera, I think: “This is a political act.” I am giving a weapon of self-representation to my community. The empowerment is in the gaze: when a person looks into my lens and gives me permission, we are saying, “I am in control of my image. I decide how I am remembered.”

IS: From the early 2000s, you have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities. How did Mother Earth come into your focus?

ZM: From the early 2000s, my work has always been about the body and land, but the shift to naming Mother Earth directly came from a deep recognition that our bodies are the first environment we inhabit. You cannot separate the violence done to Black queer bodies from the violence done to the earth. In South Africa, we see how mining, extraction, and pollution harm the poorest communities – the same communities where my participants live. I started thinking: when I photograph a Black trans woman’s hands buried, I soil, when I place a body against a tree or submerged in water, I am not just making a portrait; I am showing that we are nature. Mother Earth became my collaborator because the land holds our ancestor, our blood, our labour. The soil remembers. The ocean carries the Middle Passage. When I ask participants to lie on the earth, to merge with rock and root, I am asking: “Can you see this Black body as a mountain? Can you treat this body as sacred, like a river? The environment is not “out there.” We breathe it. We are it. And to defend our lives, we must defend the earth, because the same systems that dump waste on our land also dump hate on our bodies.

IS. You’ve spoken about the camera as a tool for people to "write their own stories." Could you share more about your teaching practice at the Muholi Art Institute? What is your ultimate vision for the young people and Black women from rural South Africa who pass through your program?

ZM: The Institute is not a school that teaches you to hold a camera correctly and then sends you off. It is home. I say to young people, to the Black women from rural areas: “You are not empty vessels waiting for knowledge. You arrive with stories, with a way of seeing that no city-trained photographer has. My role is to hand them the tool and say, ‘Write yourself.’ The camera is a pen. I teach them to photograph their own grandmothers, their lovers, their landscapes, their struggles, with tenderness. Many of these young women have been told they have no voice. I tell them: your voice is the shutter. I want them to own their archives. I do not want another generation to wait for someone from outside to document them. My ultimate vision is a network of visual activists spread across the rural areas, each one building a visual archive of their existence that is so powerful, so undeniable, that this country can no longer say we do not exist. I want them to command the galleries, the books, the walls. I want their names written in the history of photography not as subjects, but as authors.

IS: You frequently move away from the idea of "the landscape" as a separate entity, stating that "You are the environment" and nothing exists in isolation. How does African philosophy of Ubuntu shape this worldview?

ZM: Ubuntu is not a slogan; it is a lived practice that says: I am because you are. In isiZulu, we say “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” – a person is a person through other persons. This philosophy refuges separation. So, when I say, “You are the environment,” I am speaking Ubuntu. Nothing exists in isolation. The tree is my relative; the water is my ancestor’s tears. The child playing in the dust is the dust. If I harm the river, I harm myself. If I violate your body, I violate my own humanity. In my photography, when I frame a Black queer body merging with a landscape, I am making Ubuntu visible. I am showing that our freedom is tied to the freedom of the land. We cannot be safe while the forests are burned. Apartheid taught separation of peoples; colonial thinking taught separation from nature. Ubuntu teaches us that we are a web of life. The landscape is not a backdrop for my portraits; the landscape is the portraits. I am photographing the earth through the body, and the body through the earth.

Your recent work frames the Black body as a living geography inseparable from the health and politics of the Earth. You’ve even spoken about exhuming the body as an ecosystem. Could you expand on this idea? How do you view the Earth themselves as a Black body?

ZM: Yes, the Black body is a geography, a map of histories of forced migration, of buried pain, and of persistent growth. When I speak of exhuming the body as an ecosystem, I mean we must dig up the lies that say our flesh is separate from the soil and water. The earth is a Black body because the earth holds the bones of enslaved Africans thrown into the ocean, the blood of mineworkers deep in the gold seams, the sweat of women tilling fields they do not own. The earth breathes with those spirits. When I photograph a Black person covered in clay, or emerging from soil, I am showing that our living tissue is continuous with the microbial life in the ground. After death, our bodies feed the soil; we become part of the forest. In life, we are already an ecosystem – gut bacteria, skin cells, water, minerals. Western science is only catching up to what indigenous knowledge has always known: the boundary between self and environment is a fiction. To love the earth is to love the Black body, because the earth has been racialised, exploited, and discarded in the same way. Healing one requires healing the other.

IS: You’ve described your guest-editing process for Der Greif not as a solo venture, but as a "shared ecosystem." Can you expand on this?

ZM: I cannot do this alone. Just as a forest is not a single tree, this issue could not be my monologue. A shared ecosystem means that I brought in voices, eyes, and hands from my community such as other artists, thinkers, elders, young queer folk, to shape what you see. I am not interested in a singular curatorial authority. The process is one of dialogue, of intending, of passing the gaze around. I ask: “What does environment mean to you, sister, from Soweto, from Kwa-Thema, from the rural Eastern Cape? How do you photograph your relationship with water? With fire?” The issue will grow like a food garden tended by many. Even the images I will not take, I will nurture. The contributors are not just‘submitting’ work; they are co-creating a visual statement on what the environment is, and it includes the bedroom, the taxi rank, the protest, the ritual. That is ecosystem: interdependence, mutual care, and the understanding that my survival is in your seeing.

IS: How are you hoping to challenge and expand the audience's limited definition of what "the environment" actually is?

ZM: I want the audience to choke on their own limited definitions. For too long, environment has meant a pretty sunset, a pristine beach, a rhino in a game reserve – images made for a white, wealthy gaze that separates nature from people, especially Black people. I want them to see environment as the shack settlement where a queer family shares one tap; as the mine dump looming behind a township; as the polluted river where a trans woman bathes because there is no safe water. Environment is the body of a lesbian who has survived rape and still rises. Environment is the air we breathe in a shebeen, in a church, in a pride march tear-gassed by police. I want the audience to feel uncomfortable with their own nostalgia for ‘wilderness’ and confront the political ecology of our lives. The city is environment. The wound is environment. The embrace is environment. You cannot protect the planet without protecting the most marginalised bodies on it. I want the open call to bring me images that shatter the brackets, that show the earth bleeding where we bleed, and dancing where we dance.

IS: This issue explicitly sets out to break brackets, between the Global South and North, between ages, and between disciplines. What does it look like in practice? What practices are you thirst for seeing from this open call?

ZM: In practice, breaking brackets means we do not privilege the MFA graduate from a European academy over the grandmother in Limpopo who has been photographing her community’s rituals with a cellphone for twenty years. Is not a hierarchy. I want the open call to receive images from seventy-year-old intersex activists and a fifteen-year-old non-binary dreamer, side by side, each teaching the other. Breaking the North-South bracket means refusing the idea that theory comes from the North and experience from the South. We are producing knowledge here, on the ground, with our feet in the soil. Disciplines: I want the poets to send photographs, the farmers to send sonic pieces, the sex workers to send collages. I want the boundaries of photography to bleed into performance, into agriculture, into ancestral practice. What I thirst for is work that smells of life, not of the sterile gallery. I want to see images where you cannot tell where the body ends and the land begins. I want portraits of lovers in a cabbage patch, a funeral by the freeway, the joy of a drag queen in a community hall that has no running water. I want visual honesty that refuses the colonial eye. I want to see the environment as you live it… urgent, messy, sacred, and ours.