archival ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag

Artwork date: 2019
Signature details: accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist
Edition: number 1 from an edition of 10 + 2AP

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image size: 30 x 45 cm; sheet size: 42 x 59.5 cm unframed

Lee-Ann Olwage is a visual storyteller from South Africa. She is interested in using the medium of photography as a mode of co-creation and celebration. With her long-term projects, she aims to create a space where people with whom she collaborates can play an active part in the creation of images that they feel tell their stories in a way that is affirming and celebratory.

In 2020, she was awarded a World Press Photo Award, Palm Photo Prize shortlist, CAP (Contemporary African Photography) Prize shortlist, Marilyn Stafford Fotoreportage Award shortlist, IPA Honorable Mention, and was selected for The New York Times portfolio review. She is a member of Native Agency, Women Photograph and African Women in Photography. Lee-Ann Olwage is a visual storyteller from South Africa. She is interested in using the medium of photography as a mode of co-creation and celebration. With her long-term projects, she aims to create a space where people with whom she collaborates can play an active part in the creation of images that they feel tell their stories in a way that is affirming and celebratory. In 2020, she was awarded a World Press Photo Award, Palm Photo Prize shortlist, CAP (Contemporary African Photography) Prize shortlist, Marilyn Stafford Fotoreportage Award shortlist, IPA Honorable Mention, and was selected for The New York Times portfolio review.<br><br>She is a member of Native Agency, Women Photograph and African Women in Photography. Olwage and drag artist and activist Belinda Qaqamba Ka-Fassie, and other black, queer, gender non-conforming and transgender people collaborated in a project to decolonise drag culture and find a particularly African expression of drag. The aim was also to highlight the need for the African LGBTQ+ community to find their identities irrespective of their backgrounds, and to reclaim the public space in a community where they are subject to discrimination, harassment, and violence as part of everyday life. The project was created to serve as a platform of expression for black queer individuals where they were invited to co-create images that they felt told their stories in a way that is affirming and celebratory. This process of creating became a radical and progressive act of activism to reclaim the township and to stand up against the overwhelming climate of discrimination.

This image shows Belinda Qaqamba Ka-Fassie, a drag artist and activist, poses at a shisanyama – a community space where women cook and sell meat – in Khayelitsha, a township located on the Cape Flats, near Cape Town, South Africa. 4 August 2019. This image was exhibited in 45 countries as part of the World Press Photo Awards exhibition, 2020, and is currently part of the Pride Photo Award exhibition touring the Netherlands.

This image shows Mthulic Vee Vuma, a trans woman from Lingelihle township in Malmesbury, is pictured in front of a shack in Khayelitsha dressed in traditional female Xhosa clothing. This is done to challenge binary thinking that strongly differentiates between masculine and feminine traditional clothing. “Here we use our own culture to frame our identity, even though this contests the societal norms and gendered dress codes that are set in our culture. We frame our identity by tying together our stories of subjectivity and culture”, Vuma says. Her family initially struggled to accept her as a trans woman, believing it was a curse, but she says they now give her total support.

4 August 2019