Zanele Muholi's 'Faces and Phases'
MACK
We are delighted to announce Faces and Phases: 2006–2026 by South African visual activist Zanele Muholi. Through the collaborative portraits that comprise their life-long series Faces and Phases, Muholi seeks to remedy the invisibility of Black LGBTQIA+ communities by documenting each person’s individuality with radical tenderness, revealing transitions, lived experiences, and fluid expressions of gender in their lives. This ambitious new volume marking the project's twentieth anniversary showcases the project’s geographical expansion and representational diversity, assembling more than three hundred largely unpublished photographs made in places including São Paolo, Salvador, London, Porto, Los Angeles, Panama City, and Venice, as well as Muholi's native South Africa. Launching October 2026 
Faces and Phases 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. Features an extended interview with Muholi, and more than thirty-five texts and testimonies by writers, participants, and long-term collaborators and allies, including editor Renée Mussai, Lola Olufemi, Briona S. Jones, Imani Mason Jordan, Barby Asante, Thulile Gamedze, Aisha Shaibu-Lenoir, Babalwa Tyabashe-Phume, Donna A M Smith, and many more. Edited by Renée Mussai 
‘Faces and Phases has always been about more than photographs. Above all, it is about community, and relationships: between visual activist / photographer and participant, between archive and image, between the past and the future we are building together in the present. Each portrait carries a story. Each story carries a life. And each life affirms that we are here, we were here, and we deserve to be seen.' Zanele Muholi, 2026 Hasselblad Award Laureate 
Image captions: Diana Cristina Nascimento Ramos, Salvador, 2025 (header); Rabz Lansiquot, London, 2024 (middle); Christine Madonsela, Daveyton, Gauteng, 2017 (final). Book cover: Boitumelo Mnguni, KwaThema, Johannesburg, 2017.      MACK |
