Lulu Mhlana (b.1993) uses photography as her primary medium of expression, tackling the subject of identity, intimacy and existence. Since the start, she’s been using the black body as a host for her message: “I see my work as rewriting the existing and historical narrative on black bodies. As an artist, I’m essentially interested in portraiture, I take portraits of people I know personally, and I take self portraits as a means of tapping into the different emotions that I experience”.
The nude bodies in her photographs are metaphors of letting go of our physical insecurities, and meant to inspire us to embrace the body for what it is. Ultimately, she is mapping her presence and existence in the different spaces that she’s occupied, which is visible through the unique backdrops in each portrait. She processes her images to black and white because she enjoys the stillness of the processed image, with no distraction of colour. In her native language this can be interpreted as is’thunzi.
Mhlana’s flagship project Ubumnyama Bam is a series of self portraits which began in 2019. The project attempts to stress the depth of self love, far beyond the mainstream’s terms and messages. She means that it’s about having honest conversations with and by yourself, and to keep record of those conversations. For Mhlana, those conversations are kept through her photography. Besides acting as her personal archive, these records are also a contribution to the lack of black female bodies represented in mainstream media.
In 2017 Mhlana moved to Cape Town. That same year, she started photographing two close friends of hers, who also happened to be a couple. This was the beginning of what came to be known as the Uthando project. The images capture intimate moments between the two, and the project still lives on today. The intimacy that this project brought out, and the experience from the self portraits in the Ubumnyama Bam project, inevitably inspired Mhlana to include herself in Uthando.