Stan Engelbrecht & Nic Grobler have published the best 162 portraits and stories of the over 500 portraits of cyclists they’ve photographed during their 2 year journey around South Africa for the Bicycle Portraits project.

The green book contains 54 stories, and also two essays - one by a totally unknown bicycle repair shop/corner cafe owner, Leonard Stanford, from Kimberly, and another by local Cape Town based artist and bicycle commuter, Paul Edmunds.

The books are designed by Gabrielle Guy and they have also collaborated with celebrated South African artist Gabrielle Raaff to create an individual hand-painted watercolor map, based on Google Maps, to indicate the location of each of the portraits.

When they started the project, Bicycle Portraits aimed to be a study of South African commuter culture, and they wanted to find out who rides bicycles, why they ride bicycles, if and why they love their bicycles, and of course why so few South Africans choose bicycles as a transport option. But Bicycle Portraits has turned into a portrait of a nation through the bicycles that they own and ride every day - revealing all manner of social, class, historical and cultural nuances never imagined.

Click here to view all three books as a set.