Published by Trolley Books in 2004, Mr. Mkhize’s Portrait and Other Stories from the New South Africa records a country ten years after the end of apartheid. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin travelled through South Africa for three months, photographing how people lived, worked, loved and died. The book begins from a particular encounter: Mr. Mkhize, whom the photographers met in a migrant workers’ hostel outside Johannesburg, had been photographed only twice before—first for an apartheid passbook controlling his movement, then for an identity book enabling him to vote in the country’s first democratic elections. A decade later, his portrait becomes a quietly charged measure of political change.

The project is built from individual lives rather than from a single thesis. Its subjects include a Miss Teen South Africa contestant with no memory of apartheid, a circumcision initiate studying to become an accountant, and a contestant in the Miss Gay Soweto competition who hopes to marry the man he loves. These encounters are set against broader conditions: housing shortages, unemployment, violent crime, economic migration and the widespread effects of AIDS. The result is neither a simple celebration of liberation nor a catalogue of crisis. Personal aspiration and structural difficulty remain in view at the same time, alongside the country’s new constitutional freedoms and economic confidence.

For serious photobook collectors, the book’s importance lies in this dual register and in the collaboration of two photographers whose portraits and documentary observations connect public history with intimate experience. Its photographs were also displayed at Johannesburg’s new Constitutional Court, built on the site of the former Fort prison, linking the work’s social inquiry to a charged civic location. At 180 pages, the English-language paperback offers a sustained, story-based account of a transitional society—one whose political history is encountered through faces, choices and everyday realities rather than reduced to a symbolic national image.