Focus on Social Margins

Robert Mapplethorpe, Zanele Muholi, and Pieter Hugo direct their cameras toward the hard stares of subjects on the outskirts of society—ones whose gazes tell the stories of lives lived on the periphery. In the 1970s and ’80s, Mapplethorpe captured the marginal underground culture of New York City, including this image of his boyfriend of many years, Jack Walls. In South Africa, Zanele Muholi gives voice to a socially controversial gay and lesbian community; and in Ghana, Africa, Pieter Hugo snaps haunting portraits of workers laboring over toxic technological waste from the West. With each of these images, it is often hard to look—but harder yet to look away.