The word isivumelwano belongs to the Nguni language group — Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele, Swati — and it means contract, agreement, covenant. Sabelo Mlangeni borrows it for a body of photographs made at wedding ceremonies in southern Africa, where the term doubles as the everyday name for marriage itself. Across more than seventy images, gathered in an Fw:Books hardcover, he moves through nearly as many ceremonies, each with its own protocols, dress, and sense of occasion.

What holds the sequence together is not a single wedding but a recurring problem: who is permitted to stand at the centre of the picture. The couples Mlangeni photographs depart from the heteronormative template, and the communities around them observe customs that unsettle the inherited idea of the white wedding. The work has been described as both a celebration and a critique of the relationships we sustain with others; Mlangeni has said the project exposes the systems we inhabit and resist. That critical edge rarely announces itself. It sits behind the ceremonial veil, while love occupies the foreground — deliberately, as the counterforce to hatred and violence.

Designer Hans Gremmen shapes the book, and the volume carries texts by Emmanuel Balogun, Athi Mongezeleli Joja, Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni, and Tshepiso Mazibuko, so the photographs are framed by writing rather than left to speak alone. At 120 pages and 22 by 28.5 centimetres, with colour plates throughout, it reads as a considered object rather than a document dump. The series has also appeared in exhibition form, including at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam in 2022.

For a collector, the argument for the book rests on its subject and its method. The photographs ask what an agreement between two people looks like when the surrounding history has been unjust. The result is a record of intimacy that keeps its politics close to the surface without letting them overwhelm the scene.