Santu Mofokeng is a highly perceptive and significant photographer. From a brief stint as a teenage street photographer, jobs as darkroom assistant and newspaper photographer, to work with the Afrapix Collective documenting the anti-apartheid struggle, Mofokeng’s trajectory offered vital lessons about the power of representation. Increasingly frustrated with overt political photojournalism, he took a job with the African Studies Institute’s Oral History Project and began to photograph home life, street soccer and shebeens. Critical response to his first solo exhibition in 1990 made him question his responsibility to his subjects and led to closer engagement with individuals and communities. Issues of representation are a continuing focus of Mofokeng’s work: Distorting Mirror/Townships Imagined exposes the contrast between media images and private work; Black Photo Album/Look At Me 1890-1950 considers identity and personal projection in portraits; and an exhibition Mofokeng curated with Thierry Secretan, Compound to Kraal, analyses historical representations of mineworkers and bosses.
Other major themes are cultural memory and the spirit of place – the exploration of people’s psychological relationship with an environment, and the influence of environment on individual lives and identities. Many images probe the weight of meaning in, for example, night vigils, torture cells, urban areas and industrial landscapes. Bloemhof Portfolio shows the oppressive landscape of tenant farming. Chasing Shadows captures the atmosphere of religious gatherings in caves, fields and under motorways. Rethinking Landscapes informs the debate around monuments and memory of sites of massacre and concentration camps, taking it beyond Africa to Auschwitz, Hanoi and Nagasaki. Mofokeng’s work is a significant contribution to understanding and research on human development in the South African context.
Santu Mofokeng is honoured for the outstanding quality and content of his work, for his refiguration of the powers of photographic representation, for his acute insight into the cultural meanings in landscapes and the reciprocal relations of environment and development, and for his significant contribution to photography in Africa.
The Buddhist Retreat
Photographs by Santu Mofokeng
Santu Mofokeng on artnet
www.davidkrut.com
www.art2bank.com
