The hardest thing of all is to really see ourselves, and the second hardest thing is to really see each other. It takes such patience and generosity of spirit. But Zanele Muholi’s striking self-portrait with her partner Valérie implacably reminds us to look beyond defiance and defenses. How do we get to our shared humanity, to fellowship, to discerning the inherent oneness of all things? We start by looking. The way out of our private skull-sized universes, our separateness, our aloneness, is by seeing, fearless and vulnerable, beyond any of our tribal preconceptions of other tribes. Our neighbors as ourselves.

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