Santu Mofokeng

Santu Mofokeng (1956) is a South African news photographer who works under the alias Mofokengâ. Mofokeng is a member of the Afrapix collective and has won a Prince Claus Award.[1]

Career

Mofokeng was born in 1956 in Soweto, Johannesburg. While still a teenager, he began his career as a street photographer, went on to work as an assistant in a darkroom, and then he became a news photographer. Subsequently he joined the collective Afrapix; he works under the alias Mofokengâ. Initially he documented mainly the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.[1]

Mofokeng is known to be able to rearrange conventional subjection in a photographic presentation with a spiritual dimension; an example of this is Chasing Shadows from 1997. After starting off with street and news photography, he specialized in landscapes. In his images he presents them in relation to ownership, power, ecological effects and memory, but avoids an open political expression. His work shows his deep concern for the condition of the (biophysical) environment at the beginning of the 21st century.[2][3][4]

At his exhibition Let's Talk in 2010, he explained that the essence is not what you see in these photographs, but what you don't see (but feel).[5]

Solo exhibitions

Awards

References

  1. 1 2 3 Prince Claus Fund (2009) biography
  2. Luirink, Bart (April 10, 2010) blog, ZAM Africa Magazine (Dutch)
  3. Cargo Collective, biography
  4. Cargo Collective, Chasing Shadows
  5. Teeffelen, Walter van (2010) biography (Dutch)
  6. De Buren, hasing Shadows. Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays (Dutch)

External links

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