Santu Mofokeng

Santu Mofokeng (born October 19, 1956, in Johannesburg, South Africa – died January 26, 2020) was a South African photographer whose documentary and conceptual practice explored Black social life, spirituality, memory, land, and the psychic afterlives of apartheid. Working primarily across black-and-white photography, photo essay, archival intervention, and installation, Mofokeng examined everyday experience, faith, displacement, and historical violence through intimate observation, poetic sequencing, and a sustained engagement with the photographic image as both document and metaphor. Mofokeng was largely self-taught, though he later studied at the International Center of Photography in New York through the Ernest Cole Scholarship, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2016. He began as a street photographer in Soweto, worked in newspaper darkrooms, joined the Afrapix collective in 1985, and later became a photographer and researcher at the Institute for Advanced Social Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. His work often engages archive, ritual, landscape, and social history, using photographic essays, seriality, altered printing processes, and careful textual framing to consider Black interiority, sacred space, land dispossession, and the instability of historical memory.  His work has been exhibited at Jeu de Paume, Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, the International Center of Photography, Museo Reina Sofía, and the Walther Collection. He received the Prince Claus Award, the inaugural International Photography Prize from Fondazione Fotografia Modena, the Ernest Cole Scholarship, and the Mother Jones Award for Africa. Santu Mofokeng lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa.