Santu Mofokeng
On 26 January 2020, South African news and documentary photographer Santu Mofokeng died in Johannesburg. Mofokeng was a member of the Afrapix collective and won a Prince Claus Award in 2009.
Mofokeng was born on 19 October 1956 in Soweto, Johannesburg. While still a teenager, he began his career as a street photographer, went on to work as an assistant in a darkroom, and then worked as a news photographer. Subsequently, he joined the collective Afrapix, working under the alias Mofokengâ. Initially he mainly documented the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
In 1988 he started working with the African Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where he worked alongside historian Charles Van Onselen. Mofokeng spent much of the next 10 years collecting photographs of South Africa's middle class. While at Wits, Mofokeng realised the importance of answering even the simplest of questions in photography, questions like 'What are you doing?' and 'Is this what you mean?'. This process helped Mofokeng transform the way he looked at photography and find the true meaning of each photo he took.
Mofokeng emphasised the spiritual dimension of his work, as in the series Chasing Shadows from 1997. After starting off with street and news photography, he specialised in landscapes. Later projects show his deep concern for the condition of the (biophysical) environment at the beginning of the 21st century.
At his exhibition Let's Talk in 2010, he explained that the essence is not what you see in these photographs, but what you don't see (but feel).
(Source: Wikipedia)
Selected publications
Santu Mofokeng The Darkness And The Light / Sean O'Toole.
In: Aperture, no. 237, p. 113–123, 2019.
https://issues.aperture.org/article/2019/12/01/santu-mofokeng-the-darkne...
Santu Mofokeng : a silent solitude : photographs 1982-2011 / Santu Mofokeng. - Milano, Italy : Skira, [2016]
Santu Mofokeng : stories. 2-4 / Santu Mofokeng. - Göttingen : Steidl, 2016
Santu Mofokeng : Stories 1 : train church / Santu Mofokeng. - Göttingen : Steidl, 2015
Public intimacy : art and other ordinary acts in South Africa / Betti-Sue Hertz; Frank Smigiel; Dominic Willsdon. - San Francisco : Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2014
The black photo album/look at me: 1890-1950 / Santu Mofokeng. - Göttingen : Steidl, 2012
Chasing Shadows : Santu Mofokeng : thirty years of photographic essays / Corinne Diserens; Adam Ashforth; Santu Mofokeng. - München [etc.] : Prestel, cop. 2011
Violence in a time of liberation : murder and ethnicity at a South African gold mine, 1994 / Santu Mofokeng; Donald L. Donham. - Durham, NC [etc.] : Duke University Press, 2011
Appropriated landscapes / Corinne Diserens. - Göttingen : Steidl, 2011
Santu Mofokeng
1996. 47 min. Produced and directed by Minky Schlesinger. Camera: Adolf Spangenberg. Sound: Bruce Eshen. Supported by the Walther Family Foundation. © Minky Schlesinger 7 August 1996
Timeline of South African photographers via Wikidata and DBpedia
Posted on 26 January 2022, last modified on 24 January 2022