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# Zanele Muholi's Faces and Phases Marks 20 Years in a Huge MACK Book
- URL: https://www.unknowndivide.com/zanele-muholi-faces-and-phases-mack-book/
- Published: 2026-10-12T11:08:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T11:12:21.000Z
- Description: MACK's Faces and Phases: 2006-2026 gathers more than 300 largely unpublished Zanele Muholi portraits across 464 pages, marking twenty years of the visual activist's landmark series. Out October 2026.
- Author: unknowndivide staff
- Tags: Culture, Style

Some photobooks document a moment. [Zanele Muholi's *Faces and Phases: 2006-2026*](https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/faces-and-phases-zanele-muholi?ref=unknowndivide.com) documents a generation. MACK is publishing the 464-page volume this October to mark twenty years of Muholi's black-and-white portrait series of Black lesbian and bisexual women, queer, trans, non-binary and gender-fluid people in South Africa and beyond. It is one of the clearest anniversary statements a living photographic project can make.

## What is inside

Muholi calls themselves a visual activist, with a mission "to re-write a Black queer and trans visual history, for the world to know of our resistance and existence." This edition expands the geography of the work: more than three hundred largely unpublished photographs made in Sao Paulo, Salvador, London, Porto, Los Angeles, Panama City and Muholi's native South Africa. Many portraits sit beside participants' own testimonies, so the book reads as archive and conversation at once. Muholi's own line for the series is blunt and useful: "This is not art; this is life. Each and every photograph is someone's biography."

Edited by Renee Mussai, it includes an extended interview with Muholi and more than thirty-five texts and testimonies, with new essays by Lola Olufemi, Mussai, Briona S. Jones, Thulile Gamedze, Babalwa Tyabashe-Phume and Donna A M Smith, plus short contributions from long-term collaborators and allies. The physical object matches the ambition: a debossed leather hardcover with a tipped-in image, 17 x 24 cm, ISBN 978-1-917651-84-4\. MACK lists it at £65 / €70 / US$80 / AU$150 on the [U.S. store](https://www.mackbooks.us/products/faces-and-phases-zanele-muholi?ref=unknowndivide.com) and the UK site.

## Why it belongs on the shelf

MACK describes the book as a visual love letter to queer and trans communities of kinship: celebration, commemoration and reclamation in one binding. That framing matches how the portraits feel when you page through them slowly.

Faces and Phases has always been more than a portrait project. It is a living queer photographic archive built on collaboration and radical tenderness, and this anniversary volume is the clearest statement of that scale to date. The cover image is Boitumelo Mnguni, photographed in KwaThema, Johannesburg, in 2017\. If you collect photobooks for the long haul, this is the kind of object that does not get replaced by a later paperback; the leather hardcover and the tipped-in print are part of how it asks to be held.

MACK has been the home for serious photobook objects for years, and this one fits that shelf: heavy, deliberate, built to be handled as much as displayed. Pre-order now if you collect Muholi or if you have been waiting for a single volume that holds the series at this scale.

For more art and photobook reading on the site, see [Tina Barney's Fashion book from Aperture](https://www.unknowndivide.com/tina-barney-fashion-aperture-book/), our guide to [design books every designer should own](https://www.unknowndivide.com/best-design-books-every-designer-should-own/), and the opening notes on [Rosana Paulino at Parsons](https://www.unknowndivide.com/rosana-paulino-historia-natural-parsons-opening/).

[Order at MACK (UK)](https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/faces-and-phases-zanele-muholi?ref=unknowndivide.com) · [MACK (US)](https://www.mackbooks.us/products/faces-and-phases-zanele-muholi?ref=unknowndivide.com) · [MACK catalog](https://mackbooks.co.uk/?ref=unknowndivide.com) · [MACK US home](https://www.mackbooks.us/?ref=unknowndivide.com)