Santu Mofokeng: A Silent Solitude Photographs of South Africa 1982-2011

Prolific South African Santu Mofokeng  (October 19, 1956 – January 26, 2020)  has been capturing pre and post apartheid life in South Africa for over 2 decades. Mofokeng was born in Soweto, Johannesburg in 1956. As a teeneger he begun as a street photographer, growing into his full career as a photojournalist documenting the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

“Being a photographer at the time when Santu Mofokeng decided to become one was not an unmotivated act. A psychological, moral, and sometimes physical war was being fought, and South Africa was its arena. Photography could not afford to be an artistic abstraction. It was both a political and intellectual commitment. It was anger; it was revolt. But it remained, in spite of everything, a form of writing, and that is how Mofokeng approached it. Not like his country’s freedom fighters who denounced the iniquity of the ideology behind apartheid, but as the very special witness of a story which, until then, had been suppressed. By photographing his people, the places, the faces, and the streets, Mofokeng speaks to us about himself. Because all stories always begin with the person who tells them. And they come back to the teller in the end.”