Sites of Mourning

This portfolio contains descriptions of violence, and thus may be emotionally challenging for certain viewers and readers.

In a series of photographs titled Sites of Mourning, the South Africa-based photographer Lidudumalingani, focuses on sites where women were either killed or dumped after being killed. By one estimate, South Africa leads the world in femicide rates, five times higher than the global average. These sombre images serve as a monument to the women’s lives.

(This portfolio contains descriptions of violence, and thus may be emotionally challenging for certain viewers and readers.)

Bongani Kona’s accompanying essay wonders, in the first place: “how does one begin to write about a catastrophe of this scale? And what are the ethics of doing so?” He finds a partial answer not in explanation, but in the photographs’ own resistance to being narrated. He notes that “a striking feature of these photographs is how they evade or resist the imposition of story.” This resistance, he suggests, is not a formal accident but symptomatic of the catastrophe itself. “Perhaps the indeterminacy of these images reflects how violence disfigures story, shatters its coordinates of beginning, middle and end.”

Temitope Owolabi’s short story inspired by these photographs stages a different kind of rupture: it keeps the shape of conventional narrative but breaks it from within. The story follows a protagonist whose world changes after her flatmate turns up missing—a premise that promises the reader a familiar arc: disappearance, search, resolution.

But the photographs behind the story are not abstract; they document real sites where women in South Africa were killed or dumped after being killed. Against that referent, the story cannot afford the fiction that these women’s names supply. Its ending refuses the closure the form seems to promise—there is no recovery, no resolution, only the sombre fact of absence made permanent.

— Olaniyi Omiwale

More photographs by Lidudumalingani

Sites of Mourning is part of Tender Visions, our ongoing project supported with funding from the open society foundations. Tender Visions is a cross-disciplinary commissioning program for photographers and writers based on the African continent. Over the next one year, it will feature the work of thirteen photographers and twenty-six writers. This program will provide photographers with the opportunity to develop new, theme-based projects rooted in their local communities, while fostering collaborative engagements with writers who will produce creative and critical texts that contextualize the visual work. Our aim is to create space for deepened engagement with visual storytelling in Africa, and to bring new narratives to local and international audiences in insightful and thought-provoking ways. Read more about Tender Photos.