HAZEL FRIEDMAN meets Santu Mofokeng, whose work is Chasing Shadows
THE myth of Sisyphus is the story of a man who so angered the gods that he was condemned to rolling a stone up a mountain for the rest of his life. Each time he reached the summit, the stone would roll back to the bottom. And the absurd ritual would begin again …
When I first met photographer Santu Mofokeng in 1994 he was struggling with that stone. The agonising, internal battle wasn’t evident in his work at the time – he was exhibiting Rumours: The Bloemhof Portfolio, a selection of understatedly poetic images, at the Market Gallery. Nor was it evident in his startingly beautiful, visceral prose describing the imperatives behind the pictures.
It was more in the way he formulated his sentences, sucking me into the whirlpool of a consciousness in turmoil, speaking as much to himself as to me and articulating painstakingly selected words in softly passionate spurts.
Three years later, although his external circumstances might not have altered that much, Mofokeng is in a very different place. Since 1988 he has been employed at Wits University Institute for Advanced Social Research. He is still engaged in a research project to retrieve and preserve African family photographs from the decades between 1980 and 1950 and he still writes exquisite accounts of journeys through an internal labyrinth. And yes, he continues to struggle for money to fund his projects. Yet the agony seems to have abated.
And as his current exhibition Chasing Shadows reveals, his images are more poignant and glorious than ever, securing his status as one of South Africa’s photographic greats. And yet it is far too simplistic to classify Mofokng as the latest in a noble lineage, after the likes of Jrgen Schadeberg, Peter Magubane and David Goldblatt. For one thing he is not a newcomer. He emerged on the scene during the State of Emergency, during the halcyon era of South African documentary photography, alongside Paul Weinberg and Steve Hilton-Barber.
Yet he cannot be classified as a photojournalist, because his work slips too effortlessly between the real and the surreal, between outer and inner worlds. Even his more literal images of the 1980s were less documentary than documents. Many of them photographed in shebeens, they were essays in poetic ordinariness, as opposed to the more sensational subjects that were fashionable at the time. Yet within a post- apartheid context, with the focus of the camera lens moving increasingly inwards, Mofokeng’s “shot for emotion” images are finally receiving the acclaim they deserve.
“My work is about feeling,” he explains. “I cannot take photographs of things I don’t care about. I try to grasp the moment I’m in even if I can’t fully understand it, or visualise it beforehand. And I cannot separate the personal from the commercial. I guess this is in keeping with old clich: `You must look at my work and see me, and look at me and see my work.'”
Appropriately, the title of his exhibition Chasing Shadows – a retrospective of sorts – derives fron the Sotho word seriti or is’thunzi, whose multiple meanings range from ancestry and ritual to aura and status. Mofokeng describes it as an “exploration of notions of personhood … my exploration and participation in the fictions we call relationships and community. And of environments, real or imagined.”
These words translate powerfully into images like Concert Sewefontein (1989), in which Mofokeng’s focus is much on the shadows as the subjects. In one of his few colour images, On the Tracks (New York Subway), he succeeds in capturing momentary surface reflections and sensations that seem almost to explode beyond the picture frame; and in Nkuna’s Puzzle (Darragh House 1994) – one of the most poignant works on show – he photographs an arrangement of earbuds and small change placed in an ashtray in the form of a poor man’s talisman, and almost in the style of a 17th century Dutch still life.
But his art resonates principally on an emotional level. It is imbued with a spirit that defies grammar. In the real world he remains the proverbial ousider, singular, shy and softly-spoken, getting drunk at exhibition openings in order to avoid the customary social shmooze. Yet in his photographs, he embraces and immerses himself in the souls of his subjects. For him, art is not about doing that “which has not been done beore” but rather an epiphany, a sharing of the self with the other.
“We are so absorbed in the Kellogs Krispies post-modern language of globalism, racialism, multi-culturlaism,” he says. “It makes me want to scream out: `I am an individual.’ I want to belong, but only by asserting my own terms of belonging.” He adds: “Growing up in the township during apartheid, I was forced to defer to authority, told not to ask questions, to suppress curiosity. But that became an encumbrance, because I wanted to go beyond words like European and non-European which define identity in terms of negation. He adds: “Stereotypes are useful only as points of departure.”
If Mofokeng’s quest for personhood is fundamentally spiritual it has also been unashamdely obsessive. “I think at times that I have been far too self-indulgent in my quest,” he admits. Perhaps growing older has made me less self-absorbed. Perhaps I’ve reached my summit, and only the plateau lies ahead.”
A seasoned uphill runner, Mofokeng is obviously uncomfortable with straight roads. Yet now he has the kind of peace that comes with a sense of purpose. Even if, like for Sisyphus, it lies in the simple, compulsive act of rolling stones.
Chasing Shadows is on at the Getrude Posel Gallery, Wits, Johannesburg until July 25