Southern Guild, the gallery based in Cape Town and New York, will make its debut at Paris Photo with a presentation built around four women artists who treat the photograph as something to question rather than simply trust. Lebohang Kganye, Zanele Muholi, Sandra Brewster and Silvia Rosi will show at booth B54 in the fair's curated Voices sector, which this year takes disappearance as its theme.

The sector's premise is a contradiction at the heart of the medium: photography was invented to preserve moments that might otherwise vanish, yet its own boundaries keep shifting. Each of the four artists approaches that idea through family history, migration and identity. Kganye restages her family archive, stepping into her late mother's clothes in photographs layered over old portraits, and turns figures cut from family pictures into life-sized textile portraits. Rosi, born to Togolese parents and raised in Italy, uses staged self-portraits to inhabit the roles of her parents and rebuild fragments of inherited memory.

Brewster works from the opposite direction, letting the image fall apart. Her long-running Blur series photographs sitters moving their heads at a slow shutter speed, then transfers the results onto paper through a gel process that leaves folds, tears and gaps. Muholi, by contrast, insists on visibility. The South African visual activist, who received the 2026 Hasselblad Award, will show two self-portraits from the Somnyama Ngonyama series, made in District Six in Cape Town and Koreatown in Los Angeles, both places shaped by forced removal and migration.

Muholi will also take part in a public conversation with theorist Tina M. Campt on 13 November, followed by a signing on 14 November for Faces and Phases: 2006-26, a 464-page volume marking twenty years of the artist's landmark portrait project. Paris Photo, now in its 29th edition, runs at the Grand Palais from 12 to 15 November, with a preview day on 11 November.