Black Drag Magic. By Lee-Ann Olwage.

In her series "Black Drag Magic", photographer Lee-Ann Olwage focuses on the intersection of gender identity and the South African context, a "beautiful and unique place", as she says, with "a complex and diverse nation who are still in the beginning of finding and celebrating our identity". In 1996, discrimination in terms of sexual orientation was outlawed. Dangers, however, are still persisting today (via).

Above: Professional drag performer Belinda Qaqamba Ka-Fassie came up with the idea for this series in collaboration with photographer Lee-Ann Olwage. “My performances are inspired by the human condition, or rather the ‘black queer condition,'” Ka-Fassie says. (literally via)

My most recent work, #blackdragmagic, tells the stories of Black queer, gender-nonconforming and trans people who grew up and live in the townships of Cape Town. The project is about augmenting the power of daily township-spatial navigation, migration, culture, gender and sexual identity. I wanted the project to serve as a platform for Black queer bodies where they were invited to co-create images that told their stories in a way that is affirming and celebratory. 

We shot in Khayelitsha, a partially informal township in Western Cape, South Africa, located on the Cape Flats. While the township is their home, it is also a place where they are subjected to harassment, violence and discrimination on a daily basis. The process of creating the project became a radical, progressive act to reclaim the township and to stand up against the overwhelming climate of discrimination Black queer people face.

Lee-Ann Olwage

Above: Mthulic Vee Vuma poses wearing traditional Xhosa female clothing and holding a beaded stick used in marriage ceremonies. “The meaning of the clothing I am wearing is to love and accept our culture,” Vuma says. (literally via)

[It] takes a deeper look at how gender and sexual identity are influenced by cultural identity in South Africa,” she says. “They cannot be separated from each other yet, in South Africa, cultural identity often denies that queer identity exists.

Lee-Ann Olwage

Above: Mthulic Vee Vuma poses in traditional Xhosa clothing at the *tshisanyama* meat market. (literally via)

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photographs via

The Colour of Death Penalty

In the United States, people convicted of killing white people are seventeen times more likely to receive death penalty than those convicted of killing a Black person. While only 13% of the US population is Black, Black people make up 42% of those on death row. Since 1973, 185 persons (of whom 99 Black, 16 Latinx, 1 Native American) have been exonerated for wrongful convictions that sentenced them to death (via).

"Labels tied to core values of slavery and discrimination have resulted in a brutal and violent path for black individuals. Despite being aware of the unjust nature to assume the worst of race and people of little or no income, nothing is being done to correct such false assumptions made. Racism and discrimination remain deeply rooted within our society and engrained in the way American prison systems are run. Through racial and economic bias, those most typically arrested or placed on death row are people of color and those in poverty." (Tylor Keegan, Racism in Capital Punishment)

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photograph via

Samuel Fosso's Introspective Engagement with the Self

Samuel Fosso was not photographed until he was ten. As a child, he was partially paralysed until the age of three (after he had been thrown off the roof of a building by a healer which, again, was arranged by his very grandfather who had also been a healer) making his father believe that having the portrait made of a disabled child "might be a waste of money". The absence of the photographs and the Biafran Civil War, which broke out when Fosso was five, left a void in his formative years (via and via).

Above: "The Chief (who also sold Africa to the colonists)", Fosso's best shot: "This is the best. I am an African chief, in a western chair with a leopard-skin cover, and a bouquet of sunflowers. I am all the African chiefs who have sold their continent to the white men. I am saying: we had our own systems, our own rulers, before you came. It's about the history of the white man and the black man in Africa. Because they may try to cover it up these days, you know, but underneath it's still the same." Samuel Fosso

Photography became both a space of self-enunciation and a space of refuge as a child exile in the Central African Republic. The studio became the space where he could establish symbolic lines of communication with home. That’s what led him to turn the camera on himself.
Chika Okeke-Agulu

Above: "The Liberated Woman of the '70s"

Fosso's photographs might have started as self-portraiture - and, in his early years, he used to play "with a pleasant form of narcissism, common in adolescence" but they soon became performance and photographic masquerade, "a place to explore the spaces where history, politics, religion, and culture mingle and merge", a way to examine aspects of Black identity (via and via) and, as Fosso says, "a form of therapy that has enabled me to bring about a sense of self and tell the world that I exist, that I am here. Self portraits give me the opportunity to engage with my own biography." (via)

One unifying theme behind all my self portraits is the question around power. I want to express the idea that a person who is not free is not alive.
Samuel Fosso

Above: "The Golfer"

Africa was arbitrarily divided into countries by European colonialists. I wanted my studio to reflect my desire to create a sense of pan-African unity and identity.
Samuel Fosso

Above: "The Pirate"

Fosso uses photography as a tool of postcolonial critique to examine the interconnectedness of modern life through the dual lens of Pan-Africanism and foreign influence from both the East and the West. While many critics have focused on the aspects of gender and sexuality in Fosso’s work, Okeke-Agulu points to a much deeper line that runs through his practice: the fundamental issue of displacement he experienced in his youth. (via)

The yearning to return home is one of the most powerful motivations for him as an artist. His art was one of the only avenues to accomplish that homeward journey,” Okeke-Agulu says. “There is a ritualistic aspect of acting that is important to him. The masquerade is not simply about the physical performance, it is also a philosophical and spiritual connection to imagined communities in his hometown in Nigeria, or the Pan-African world of Blackness – a quest to return home that he did not accomplish until 2015 when he moved his family back to Nigeria and built a studio there.
Chika Okeke-Agulu

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photographs (series TATI) via 

“That’s how my Tati series (1997) began, because I did not want to go back to the black-and-white style as Keïta and Sidibé had done for their Tati commissions. Since there were three African photographers, I wanted my project to register a different mood of the African imagination, and not the images that were already associated with African photography. My goal was to take a new direction in my work.” Samuel Fosso

Them. By Mohammed Gardaya.

Muhammed Gardaya is a young Sudanese man who was forced to flee the violence of Darfur and seek asylum in Europe. His film "Them" is, according to its director Adrien Landre, "a metaphor for the refugees' condition." He continues: "Their lives become a loop, an eternal resumption, an infinite vertigo. Labels such as 'migrant' or 'refugee' systematically reduce people to a monolithic group. It denies any notion of their individuality." (via)

::: Watch "Them": LINK

Gardaya's open letter:

In the name of Allah! I will tell you about my story. Today I am here in Paris. I am only here because I was obliged to. I have left my people to death and rape, and for this I am a criminal. I should have stayed in Sudan and died there with a clear conscience instead of living in this world of punishment. At every moment I remember my father, my mother and siblings. My body is here but my mind is always there with them. I am a young man who has let his people and homeland down by coming here, only to live in loneliness and suffering.

Seven years ago, back in my village called Wand, I had a decent life. There was peace and dignity. I enjoyed horse riding, camel racing, swimming and shepherding. But one day we woke up to a nightmare. Our own people came and destroyed everything. They raped our mothers and sisters and killed our fathers and brothers. We wept until our eyes dried up and our hearts became hard like stones. We wanted to take revenge, but if my father were not there I would have taken a gun and killed them, like they killed us. Without my father I would not be alive today. So, for my father I fled my homeland. I now have no fear for my life because my life has no meaning anymore. It is full of suffering and bitterness and sadness. My life is useless. 

I am talking to you today as friends so I can attenuate my deep suffering, distress and sorrow. I was lonely and humiliated until a group of people came and asked me to leave this sphere of sadness. I found friends at Good Chance who made me feel like a human being. They made me feel that there is still humanity in the world and a chance for life. I am so grateful for all of them and I thank them so much for everything they did for me. They used to ask me what I was looking for when I fled my homeland. I am just looking for dignity, peace, happiness and humanity. I just want to live like everybody else in this world.

Thank you very much.

Your brother, 

Mohammed Mostapha Gardaya

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image via

Never Look At The Sun

Congolese-Belgian filmmaker and rapper Baloji explores the practice of skin bleaching in black communities using the expression "Never look at the sun" and knowing a lot of people who have experience skin bleaching ... not "to reject their Black or African identity but more to decrease the effect of darker skin has in society".

Never look at the sun is an expression I heard growing up,. Never look at the sun and don’t play under it because you're dark enough. It's a way parents try to protect their children, but this has side effects.

::: Watch "Never Look At The Sun": LINK 

The film's protagonist bathes in a fictional lightening product, is covered in withe lace and heavy fabrics, Baloji plays with darkness and light. The film is "a declaration on the beauty of dark skin", the poem is written by Thandi Loewenson and  narrated by Dorrie Wilson, a decolonial thinker.

I know a lot of people who have experienced skin bleaching, It's never done to reject their Black or African identity but more to decrease the effect darker skin has in society. Ancestral patterns combined with modern prejudices and stigma explain skin bleaching. We can’t criticize the practice because it’s rooted in cultural conceptions, interpretations, and questions of self-consciousness. (via)

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image via

Tennis, Unstable Girls, Sexist Comments and Questions

"You know, the girls, they are more unstable emotionally than us. I'm sure everybody will say it's true, even the girls. … No? No, you don't think? But, I mean, it's just about hormones and all this stuff. We don't have all these bad things, so we are physically in a good shape every time, and you are not. That's it."

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

"Hopefully they're (his sisters) not going to pursue a professional tennis career. Hopefully, because for a woman, it's tough. I wouldn't like my sisters to become professional tennis players. It's tough choice of life. A woman needs to enjoy life a little bit more. Needs to think about family, needs to think about kids. What kids you can think about until age of 27 if you're playing professional tennis, you know. That's tough for a woman, I think."

Ernests Gulbis

“As a woman, you start getting to a certain age, hitting certain milestones and then it is straightaway assumed – ‘okay, well, when’s the baby coming?’ I’m not sure they’re asking Rafa Nadal when was finally going to marry his girlfriend before he did, or when he is going to have kids.

 I don’t think it’s done with any harm, but it would be nice to talk about my career and things like that – like my male counterparts in the sport. 

One, it’s a very personal decision and, you know, I think it can be a bit insensitive, especially for people who maybe don’t want to have children, or have other difficulties.

I think it was unfortunate that I was asked such questions, but I was not alone in that. And while our tennis press is mainly made up of middle-aged men, I think the questions are going to be catered so.” 

Johanna Konta

"After games us women still receive provocative comments on social media. I doubt that is the case for those on the men's tour. Our outfits are discussed, and how we wear our hair."

Andrea Petkovic

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photograph via

Women Who Objectify Other Women

Abstract: This study was designed to test the extent to which women who self-objectify also objectify other women. One hundred thirty-two university students and their friends (64 women and 68 men) completed three questionnaires: (1) Noll and Fredrickson’s (1998) Self-Objectification Questionnaire, (2) a modified version of that questionnaire that measured individuals’ objectification of others, and (3) Slade, Dewey, Newton, and Brodie’s (1990) Body Cathexis scale. 

Women were more likely than men to self-objectify. Self-objectification was negatively related to body satisfaction for women but not for men. Both women and men objectified women more than they objectified men, although women’s objectification of other women was not significantly different than their objectification of men. Men objectified women more than women did, and women objectified men more than men did. Women were more likely to objectify other women than to objectify themselves. Higher self-objectification among both women and men was related to increased objectification of other women and men, but the relationships were stronger for women. Results indicate that women also objectify women, although not to the degree exhibited by men. (Strelan & Hargreaves, 2005)

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- Strelan, P. & Hargreaves, D. (2005). Women Who Objectify Other Women: The Vicious Circle? Sex Roles, 52, 707-712, link

- photograph via

Male fashionistas, female football fans, gender stereotypes and neurophysiological correlates

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that pre-existing contextual information, such as gender stereotypes, is incorporated online during comprehension (e.g., Van Berkum, van den Brink, Tesink, Kos, & Hagoort, 2008). Stereotypes, however, are not static entities, and social role theory suggests that they may be influenced by the behavior of members of the group (Eagly, 1987). Consequently, our study examines how gender stereotypes affect the semantic processing of statements from both a male and a female speaker, as well as investigating how the influence of stereotypes may change as listeners gain experience with individual speakers. 

Participants listened to male and female speakers produce sentences about stereotypically feminine (fashion) and stereotypically masculine (sports) topics. Half of the participants heard a stereotype congruent pattern of sentences (e.g., for the male speaker, semantic errors about fashion but no semantic errors on sports sentences) and the other half heard a stereotype incongruent pattern. We found that the N400 effect of semantic correctness is larger in stereotype incongruent conditions. Furthermore, in stereotype congruent conditions, only stimuli presented in the male voice show an N400 effect in the expected direction (larger N400s to semantic violations). Additionally, when we examined ERP changes over the course of the experiment, we found that the degree of change in amplitude was predicted by individual differences in ambivalent sexism. These results suggest that not only are speaker characteristics incorporated during online language processing, but also that social knowledge influences language processing in a manner congruent with social role theory. (Grant, Grey & van Hell, 2020)

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- Male fashionistas and female football fans: Gender stereotypes affect neurophysiological correlates of semantic processing during speech comprehension. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 53, link

- photograph (stock photo from 1970s, H. Armstrong Roberts studio) via

Blacks vs Whites Detecting Racism

Black and White US-Americans disagree when it comes to the prevalence and definition of racism. 53% of Blacks but only 17% of Whites believe that racism is a critical issue in the US. While both groups agree that the amount of anti-Black bias decreased in the past decades, Blacks still see it as relatively prevalent today in contrast to Whites who believe it to be historically low and negligible... On the contrary, they think that anti-White bias has increased over time.

Shootings motivated and/or possibly motivated by racism are hence also interpreted differently; so are their consequences. 18% of Blacks report a great deal or fair amount of confidence in shooting investigations compared to 52% of Whites who do.

Whites tend to have difficulties detecting subtle racism and rather focus on blatant clues while Blacks are vigilant for ambiguous cues.

One reason for this discrepancy may be that participants were differentially motivated to perceive racism because of their racial group membership and the degree to which their own group was implicated by the task. Because people strive to protect and defend their ingroup (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), considering the category of “White racist” may threaten White individuals’ egalitarian selves, implicating their group as the perpetrators of racism against racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, Whites may be motivated to adopt a higher threshold for behavior (i.e., only blatant cues), as a way to afford their ingroup the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous situations. However, considering the category of “White racist” would not pose the same threat to racial and ethnic minorities whose group would ostensibly be the targets of racism in this scenario. Instead, their past experiences as targets may cause minorities to be more vigilant for indicators of discrimination against minorities compared to majority group members (Crocker & Major, 1989; Kaiser, Vick, & Major, 2006; Pinel, 1999). Thus, racial and ethnic minorities may be motivated to protect and defend their group by using a lower threshold when determining what counts as racism (i.e., blatant and subtle cues).

- Carter, E. R. & Murphy, M. C. (2015). Group-based Differences in Perceptions of Racism: What Counts, to Whom, and Why? Social and Personality Psychology Compass 9/6 (2015): 269–280, link
- photograph by Bruce Davidson via

Haiti, Carnival and Leah Gordon's Performed Ethnography

After enduring slavery and other kinds of savagery for centuries, the Haitian people introduced the archetype of the zombie and by doing so continued telling their tale and preserved their history and culture in carnival, an annual masquerade that is "a magnificent celebration of a people who have survived against all odds, honouring their ancestors and passing their stories along from one generation to the next".

British photographer Leah Gordon began travelling to Haiti in 1991 and started working on "Kanaval" in 1995 chronicling the unique expression of Carnival over a period of seven years and collecting "the mythic figures that convey the hypnotic energy of carnival". Gordon speaks Kreyòl to be able to establish a connection with the sitters.

As a photographer, I have always been keenly aware of the difficulties and responsibilities in representing Haiti. Since the [revolution], Haiti has been a mythological epicentre for racist and colonial anxieties and many of these encoded mythologies are reproduced and replicated through the visual representation of Haiti.

Leah Gordon

Gordon collected oral histories - since images alone were not enough - aiming to "reduce the spectacle and restore the narrative to the photographs" and making sure her photography did not reinforce negative stereotypes.

"For centuries, the Taino-Arawakan people and the Carib Indians lived on the island of Ayiti (“land of high mountains”) in the tranquil blue waters of the Caribbean. All of that changed when Christopher Columbus arrived on 4 December 1492, charging in alongside the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Conquistadors brought colonisation, slavery, and disease to the once idyllic land, wiping out the indigenous communities and repopulating the island with people stolen from Africa.

Spain wasn’t the only European nation taking what was not rightfully theirs. By 1697, the French made inroads, forcing the Spanish to cede the western third of the island to France. After a century of brutal rule, the people overthrew this barbaric regime in 1804 to become the first Black republic on earth and the only nation to arise from a successful slave revolt. Suffice to say, Western powers were terrified by this ferocious show of force. Fearing retribution, they marshalled their resources to destroy the young nation, which took the name Haiti in tribute to its pre-Colombian roots.

In 1825, France ordered Haiti to pay reparations (worth £200 billion today) for the loss of income made off the free labour of slaves, a debt that wasn’t settled until 1947. Then, in 1915, the United States invaded the tiny nation, took control of the banks, and established a return to slavery through forced labour. After two decades of brutish occupation, the foreign invaders were finally ousted from the land, though that wouldn’t stop them from continuing to meddle in Haitian affairs.

Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and ranks 68th on the UNDP Human Poverty Index sale, with an estimated 65 per cent of the people living below the poverty line, earning less than £2.04 per day." (via)

photographs by Lea Gordon via