SPEAKING THROUGH PICTURES
A former street photographer documents the drama of ordinary lives.
SANTU Mofokeng is 60 this year and while his health is suffering from the debilitating effects of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a rare disease that has left him unable to speak, a new series of photobooks speaks volumes about his unique perspective and singular photographic talent.
Published by German art book heavyweights Steidl in collaboration with MAKER and curated by US-based Joshua Chuang, the series adds to Mofokeng’s already much acclaimed and varied body of work through the collection of images from his archive. These complement and reinforce his famous assertion that what you don’t see in his photographs is perhaps more important than what you do.
He began taking photographs as a street photographer in Soweto in his teens and after working in various odd jobs he returned to photography in 1985 when he joined the legendary Afrapix Collective. While initially he produced work in line with the collective’s mission to document the brutality of the struggle, Mofokeng soon adopted his own contrary but totally relevant approach to the injustices of apartheid.
Feeling that the agenda driven by news photography was proliferated by images of violence and death, Mofokeng sought to show the humility and resilience of the lives of ordinary black people living their everyday lives in spite of the injustices of an oppressive regime.
His photo essays documented subjects such as the train preachers and the residents of the town of Bloemhof over the course of several years.
Mofokeng arrived in Bloemhof in 1988 while working for the Institute of Advanced Social Research at Wits University on a project for historian Charles van Onselen that would become the book The Seed Is Mine about the tenant farmer Kas Maine.
Stories 2 consists of three simply but elegantly designed books, presented in a brownpaper envelope. These are evocative, one supposes, of the manner in which they might have been archived. They document a concert, a funeral and the momentous day of the first democratic elections in 1994.
Oblique is a term one hears a lot in relation to Mofokeng’s work, but it’s an apt description. While one may know what the general umbrella moment is that links the photos, it’s his preference for shots that suggest rather than hammer home the idea that sets him apart.
The grainy, immediate blackand-white photographs of people enjoying themselves at a concert in Sewefontein take full advantage of the brief opportunity to escape what Mofokeng describes as the “endless toil and drudgery of farm life”. The reality of the restrictions of the time is outside the frame and there is still an immediacy and energy to the photographs.
In the series Funeral, the family and friends of Miriam Maine, a woman whose life Mofokeng recalls as “obscure but [lived] simply and admirably”, his camera captures each aspect of the ritual without judgment and with a dignity that gives her funeral a respect she would not have been granted by the people in the world in which she lived.
Mofokeng returned to Bloemhof to capture its residents’ participation in the elections on April 27 1994. He describes the atmosphere as pervaded by “an uneasy sense of euphoria . . . combination of anticipation and dread, excitement and anxiety. Rumours abounded. I heard wild stories about results being rigged; passengers being bundled out of taxis and sjambokked . . . bombs going off in the distant Boer strongholds of Delareyville and Christiana; and National Party posters being taken down at night.”
These photos reflect all these things while also standing as a testament to the determination of people to vote for a democratic era.
Together the three books in the second Stories publication provide an expansion to Mofokeng’s work as well as a testament to his vision and dedication to the idea of demonstrating the ordinary in the face of extraordinary social and historical conditions.
They will form part of a selection of images to be exhibited by MAKER at this year’s FNB Joburg Art Fair ahead of an international touring exhibition of his work that will promote the rest of the books to be published in the Stories series. The archive enriches already exhibited work and deepens our appreciation of Mofokeng’s singular talents — his intimacy with his subjects, his understanding of their humanity and his haunting and delicate portraits of their lives which are simultaneously of their time and completely timeless.
He may not be able to talk, but Mofokeng’s work sings loudly of the indefatigability of the human spirit and is an achievement in the annals of photography at home and abroad.
Santu Mofokeng is presented at the FNB Joburg Art Fair by Steidl and MAKER and forms part of the Art Publications Exhibition hosted by The Sowetan’s “S Mag”.
‘Stories 2’ is available from www.makerstudio.co.za