Today we look at our favourite images from South African veteran photographer Santu Mofokeng.
Born in Soweto, Johannesburg 1985, Mofokeng began his career as a street photographer during his teenage years, documenting life in and around the neighbourhood he grew up in.
Following a period of time assisting in a darkroom which led to him becoming a news photographer, Mofokeng joined Afrapix, a progressive photographers’ collective and agency founded in 1947 by the photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger, and William Vandivert.
Afrapix played a seminal role in the discourse of (documentary) photography; and for artists in the resistance movement against apartheid. It was within this collective that Mofokeng, like many others, devoted himself and his practice to recording the struggles against apartheid.
Mofokeng became an increasingly important critic of the mainstream struggle photojournalism of the time, and sought to challenge the ways that black South Africans were represented in the international image economy during these years.
Joshua Chuang, the Robert B. Menschel senior curator of photography at the New York Public Library, called Mr. Mofokeng “one of the great world figures in photography of the past 50 years.”
