“From Where Loss Comes asks us to hold in the same visual space love and violence, sacrifice and gain, mutilation and beauty, personal loss and community belonging. In a deeply sensitive, sobering collection of photographs, Malde captures the humanity contained in a fundamentally inhumane practice and compels viewers to linger with their own self-reflection of how they may bring hurt even as they care.” — Dr. Linda Mayes, the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology and Director of the Yale Child Study Center.

”In its exploration of the wrenching subject of ritual female genital mutilation, Pradip Malde’s ‘From Where Loss Comes’ offers a masterful, resonant body of photographs notable for its solemnity as well as its rare sensitivity.” — Richard Rothman

“In this book of insightful portraits, Pradip Malde captures the viewer’s attention with their photographic beauty while taking a deeper look into one of humanities darkest practices. The perception and compassion of Malde’s eye is palpable.” — Meg Partridge Director, Imogen Cunningham Trust

”Pradip Malde presents a timely and painful story of human nature and our quest for power through his brilliantly rendered platinum prints. Spectacularly produced, From Where Loss Comes reveals much about the book’s subject and its reader, with very little space between the two.” — Andrea Modica

From Where Loss Comes is an unblinking look at how sacrifice and belonging are deeply rooted in the human experience.

Sixty photographs and close to 9,000 words consider a pain and suffering that is private, sacrificial, and yet rattles against values that are thought of as being inalienable — our fundamental human rights.

It is a story of the root causes of female genital cutting and mutilation (FGM/C). The practice presents a tragic dialectic. By submitting to a personal loss, a woman may be assured of membership in a community. Her alternative is to remain intact and enter into exile. It is an impossible choice.

For this work, Pradip Malde (Tanzania, 1957) returned to his birth country after an absence of forty-six years. WITH Sarah Mwaga, founder of the Anti Female Genital Mutilation Network (AFNET), he traveled more than 3,000 miles over three years, visiting remote communities to converse with and to photograph activist women (victims of FGM/C), the sacred sites where these rituals take place, and the cutting tools used by ngariba (Swahilli for “circumcisers”) who have renounced the practice.

Malde received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2018 to complete the project. This book is dedicated to the life and work of Sarah Mwaga, who passed away in 2021 just as the book was at its final stages of production.

Book Details:

• Edition of 1000

• Hardcover, embossed linen

• 92 pages, swiss binding

• 60 b&w photographs

• 10 x 14 inches

• Printed China