Faces and Phases

Since 2006, Zanele Muholi has been photographing Black lesbian, bisexual, and queer women as well as trans and gender non-conforming individuals in South Africa and beyond to create 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showcases its geographical expansion and representational diversity, assembling more than three hundred largely unpublished photographs made in places including São Paolo, Salvador, London, Porto, Los Angeles, Panama City, and Muholi’s native South Africa. Describing themselves as a visual activist, their mission is ‘to re-write a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa (and beyond), for the world to know of our resistance and existence’. Through these collaborative portraits, Muholi seeks to remedy the invisibility of Black LGBTQIA+ communities by documenting each person’s individuality, revealing transitions and fluid expressions of gender in their lives. These striking photographs are often accompanied by participants’ testimonies elaborating their personal histories and lived experiences. Muholi’s interweaving of voice and image creates a textured visual vocabulary in which their 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 communities of kinship: an ode to resilience and recognition which is equal parts celebration, commemoration, and reclamation.