The South African photographer Santu Mofokeng, who documented the lives of black citizens in post-apartheid South Africa, has died. Featuring subjects in rural and urban landscapes, his work highlighted and brought to a wider audience the nuances of a country experiencing great societal shift.
Born and raised in Soweto, a township in the city of Johannesburg, Mofokeng first developed an interest in photography as a teen when he began working as a street photographer before moving on to become a darkroom assistant. Shortly after this, as the apartheid era was coming to an end, he freelanced as a news photographer. In the early 1980s, Mofokeng, with other prominent South African photographers such as Omar Badsha, joined Afrapix, a collective and agency representing amateur and professional photographers who worked in what came to be known as struggle or resistance photography. Over the span of a decade, beginning in 1988, he was a photographer and researcher for the African Studies Institute’s Oral History Project, at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2016. In 1991, Mofokeng received the Ernest Cole Scholarship to study at the International Center of Photography in New York, USA and in 1992 he was awarded the first Mother Jones Award for Africa for outstanding work in covering social issues through photography. In 2016, Mofokeng won the International Photography Prize.
Mofokeng enjoyed 25 solo exhibitions between 1990 and 2016, and participated in numerous group shows and biennials globally, including Documenta 11, the Venice Biennial in 2007 and 2013, and the fifth edition of Recontres de Bamako.
30 January 2020
