By one estimate, South Africa leads in femicide rates, five times higher than the global average. These sombre images are focused on sites where women were either killed or dumped after being killed. Accompanied by ruminative captions by the photographer, Sites of Mourning serves as a monument to the women's lives.

In describing these photographs, the photographer Lidudumalingani offers two prefatory facts: they were taken in Zikhovane, an Eastern Cape mountain village in South Africa where he was born, soon after COVID-era restrictions were lifted. By this he indicates how his stance is that of a local, and how, seen correctly, these are pictures of a life in the interregnum between upheaval and aftermath.The interregnum is most sharply observed in the image of a desolate, lonesome bus stop. By every indication it is dysfunctional. A low mountain range stretches along in the background, as the road in the foreground is framed so it shows nothing of a here or there. The desolation of the bus stop might have predated the pandemic, but its inclusion in a series otherwise dedicated to a village’s collective rhythms is telling. It is an apt representation of the disquieting stillness the village was plunged into, one that must have been intensified by the spareness of landscape.A local of a village owes little of his reasoning about the place of his birth to empirical evidence. He knows things first by experience, and perhaps later—in adulthood or after an absence—by a somewhat detached reckoning. Photography’s great utility is to serve as a sort of interpreter between the native and his land. So that when he frames a picture of boys on horses, or zooms his camera towards a shearer’s hand, what he sees is a version of himself in the middle of those tasks.This is clear in what Lidudumalingani had written of one of the photographs, alluding to the activity in a near-precise sequence: “Shearing sheep is an essential skill for young boys, without it, one is not boy enough. It’s violent, manly, difficult. The young boy must run after the sheep in the garden, violently pull it around the garden by its wall, into the shed where it would be sheared, and then pin it down to the floor with their knee, whilst the seizer cuts the thick fair of the sheep.”Besides the animals there are the mourners. In both instances, they are pictured from behind: a cluster of men in dark clothing seen from the opening of a tent, another group with women in the foreground, with gravestones to the right and left. The most common accessory, besides the identical black or red attire, is a face mask. Yet it is not only telling that they cover half their faces. It is also the choice to identify each person at a remove, to picture no one with a return glance.We might assume that the more familiar a photographer is, the more expressive his shots would be. Not so here. The tone of these images—minimal in their details and scrupulously composed—match their subject matter, of a village easing into another lease on life, patient with itself.— Emmanuel IdumaLidudumalingani is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, and currently works as a Commissioning Editor at Multichoice/Showmax. See more of Lidudumalingani’s work on Tender Photo here, here, and here. Read NextOwo Da?Afro-UniteSites of MourningTender Photo, Projected

Boys, animals, masculinity, landscape. This is an entire childhood, framed and condensed into pixels. Before any village boy knows themselves, they know the contours of the landscape, every undulating detail of it, and how to be a man. In each of these three photographs, there is a boy, an animal

When I was in my adolescence, an old woman in the neighbouring village started telling incoherent and farfetched stories, and one of them was about people who lived under water. The men in her stories stood on the floor of the ocean and held all of the mass of the

I’m interested in Johannesburg as a migrant city and how in becoming a metropolis it cannot shake off being a migrant city. This image, these train tracks, these trains, remind me of the arrival of all the mine workers who came to work in the mines around the city in the 1800s. It reminds me of my own father, whom as a young boy, came here to work in the mines.