Faces and Phases

This is not art; this is life. Each and every photograph is someone’s biography.’ Zanele Muholi

Since 2006, Zanele Muholi has been documenting Black lesbian and bisexual women, queer, trans, non-binary, and gender fluid people in South Africa and beyond, creating the remarkable black-and-white portraits that form their life-long series Faces and Phases.

This ambitious new volume, which is released to mark the project’s twentieth anniversary, showcases its geographical expansion and representational diversity, assembling more than three hundred largely unpublished photographs made in places including São Paolo, Salvador, London, Porto, Los Angeles, Panama City, as well as Muholi’s native South Africa. Describing themselves as a visual activist, their mission is ‘to re-write a Black queer and trans visual history, for the world to know of our resistance and existence’. Through these collaborative portraitures, Muholi seeks to remedy the invisibility of Black LGBTQIA+ communities. Documenting each person’s individuality with radical tenderness, these striking photographs are often accompanied by participants’ testimonies, sharing their personal stories, feelings, and lived experiences. This potent interweaving of voice and image creates a textured visual vocabulary in which the artist’s collaborators present themselves on their own terms, and from which a collective, living queer photographic archive emerges.

Faces and Phases: 2006–2026 is an ever-evolving visual love letter to queer and trans communities of kinship: an affirmative ode to resilience and recognition, which is equal parts celebration, commemoration, and reclamation. 

Edited by Renée Mussai

Featuring an extended interview with the artist, and more than thirty-five texts and testimonies, including new essays by Lola Olufemi, Renée Mussai, Briona S. Jones, Thulile Gamedze, Babalwa Tyabashe-Phume, and Donna A M Smith, plus short contributions from Barby Asante, Skye Chirape, Imani Mason Jordan, Myah Asha Jeffers, Aisha Shaibu-Lenoir, Dorothea Smartt, Christie van Zyl, Lemara Lindsay-Price, Lesego Tlhwale, among others – many of whom are participants, collaborators, and long-term allies.

Cover photograph: Boitumelo Mnguni, KwaThema, Johannesburg, 2017. © Zanele Muholi.