Hear the legend of the infamous Kgodumodumo monster, who swallowed all the people, except one pregnant woman. In time, her son, Senkatana, becomes a mighty hero when he confronts the monster, and frees all the people. They ask their young liberator to be their ruler, but how long will they be satisfied with his rule?
“…with the so-called civilised workers, almost without exception their civilisation was only skin deep.” O. Pirow, quoting South African Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog For this book Santu Mofokeng collected private photographs which urban black working and middle-class families in South Africa commissioned between 1890 and 1950, a time when the government was creating policies towards thosedesignated as “natives”. Painterly in style, the images evoke the artifices of Victorian photography. Some of them are fiction, a creation of the artist in terms of setting, props, clothing and pose – yet there is no evidence of coercion. We believe these images, as they reveal something about how these people imagined themselves. In this work Mofokeng analyses the sensibilities, aspirations and self-image of the black population and its desire for representation and social recognition in times of colonial rule and suppression. The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950 is drawn from an ongoing research project of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
In 1988 Santu Mofokeng joined the staff of the African Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand as a documentary photographer and began to record the lives of tenant laborers in the unremarkable township of Bloemhof. Over the next several years Mofokeng amassed what could be considered the core of his larger body of work — a set of interconnected photo-essays centering on the Maine family, with whom he stayed. Highly distilled yet immersive, Books 2 through 4 of the series Santu Mofokeng Stories form a loose trilogy that describes how the residents of Bloemhof unwind, bury one of their own, and gathered together on one of the most consequential days in South African history.
Over the course of a few weeks in 1986, aboard the crowded and precarious Soweto-Johannesburg train he took to and from his job as a darkroom printer, Santu Mofokeng photographed a ritual he witnessed daily. His fellow commuters, working-class residents from the surrounding townships, would spontaneously begin to sing. Bible-wielding preachers would sermonize, prayers would be uttered, and murmurs would gradually build into a raucous chorus replete with clapping, bell-ringing, dancing, and improvised drums. “These pictures capture two of the most signifi cant features of South African life,” Mofokeng says, “the experience of commuting (migrancy) and the pervasiveness of spirituality.” The first of a defining series of photo-essays by Mofokeng that Steidl will release in the coming years, Train Church is the photographer’s earliest long-form story—newly revised and expanded, and brought palpably to life in an oversize format.