Zanele Muholi’s face is luminous — and framed by a headdress of inflated latex gloves. The image is typical of the Johannesburg-based photographer’s theatrical self-portraits, where hairstyles, headgear and objects as diverse as a majestic necklace of cowrie shells or a wooden stool worn as a hat or crown suggest multiple personas and layers of historic, cultural and political meaning.

As Muholi has said, you might look at the latex gloves, “and think of balloons and play, rather than the constraints of work and domesticity or the need to breathe, to feel deflated.” Characteristic of Muholi’s work, that photograph is about all of these things, and much more.

The image is one of more than 90 self-portraits in “Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness” (Aperture), a monograph accompanying a traveling exhibition organized by Renée Mussai for Autograph ABP in London and now at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta through Dec. 8. In addition to photographs, the book contains essays, criticism and poems by more than 20 curators, art historians and writers.