Overview

Santu Mofokeng began to dedicate himself to portraying everyday experience in South African townships in 1985, first as a member of the Afrapix collective, and then as a documentary photographer for the African Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. This set of publications, which continues a groundbreaking reappraisal of the photographer's archive, presents aspects of life in Soweto, where Mofokeng grew up; Dukathole, a township in the East Rand of Gauteng Province; and Johannesburg, the city in which he worked. Taken together, they invite a nuanced understanding of largely unsung narratives from a crucial period in South African history which saw the demise of apartheid. Mr. Mofokeng produced some of the great pictures of the apartheid years, but his images were different from many others of the time. His interest was less in a photojournalistic documenting of battles between South African blacks and the repressive government, than in recording the dynamics of another front line: daily life in black communities. Holland Cotter, The New York Times

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9783958292772

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[Mofokeng's] photographs have used a variety of techniques to adumbrate this world. The pictures drift away from the picturesque and come closer to life itself . . . These are photographs of quiet disorder and imprecision, shadow-work and strategic refusal, evocations of what can neither be hurried along nor extinguished.--Teju Cole The New York Times Magazine

Author Information

Santu Mofokeng was born in Johannesburg in 1956. After working as a darkroom assistant for various newspapers, he joined Afrapix, a collective of photographers dedicated to the struggle against apartheid. His interest in depicting ordinary township life, however, led him to work for the African Studies Institute at Wits University from 1988 until 1998. Over the past three decades, Mofokeng has created an exceptional, open-ended body of work that probes the meaning and authority of photography while subverting stereotypical notions of the black South African experience. In 2011 a retrospective of Mofokeng's work opened at the Jeu de Paume in Paris before traveling internationally, and in 2013 he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale.

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