The title of Santu Mofokeng’s exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery and the Standard Bank Gallery, Invoice, may be read as a kind of statement, an account of events, people and places in pictorial narrative. The exhibition includes photographs from virtually all of Mofokeng’s major bodies of work produced between 1982 and 2006, and is a landmark event designed to coincide with the photographer’s 50th year.
Mofokeng is held in the highest regard by just about everyone involved with photography. According to international curator Simon Njami, he is “one of the most important photographers of his generation”; acclaimed photographer David Golblatt has said that his “photographs of life and landscape in southern Africa are among the finest that we have”; and art journalist Hazel Friedman, writing in 1997, commented that “his images are more poignant and glorious than ever, securing his status as one of South Africa’s greats”.
Mofokeng’s photographic career began in 1973 when, while still at school, he started working as a street photographer to make money. He subsequently came to understand photography’s subversive potential when he saw pictures of the June 16 uprising in which he was a participant. In 1985 he joined the Afrapix Collective, an independent photographic agency that played a leading role in documenting popular resistance against apartheid.
Although Mofokeng did produce images of the struggle, he was, as he puts it, “less interested in the ‘unrest’ than in the ordinary life in the townships” and became “unhappy with the propaganda images which reduced life in the townships into one of perpetual struggle …”. Turning away from the orthodox struggle images of the 1980s and early 1990s, Mofokeng produced a large body of work on life in its many facets in Soweto and other townships, and also began focusing on spirituality as a theme — an enduring interest that spawned Train Church, a body of photographs from 1986 about church services held on commuter trains running between Soweto and Johannesburg.
In 1996, 10 years after the Train Church series, Mofokeng produced another body of work dealing with spirituality and the relation between people and their environment — Chasing Shadows, a documentation of religious ceremonies including photographs taken at the Motouleng Caves in the Free State, some of which feature Mofokeng’s brother, Ishmael, shortly before his death from an Aids-related illness. Artist and author Sue Williamson has described these photographs, which focus on rituals performed by followers of the Zionist Apostolic faith, as being among the “most beautiful in the South African canon”.
Mofokeng’s interest in places invested with spiritual meaning and public memory has taken him from concentration camp sites and burial grounds in Middelburg and Brandfort in South Africa, to the catacombs in Paris, France, and to a site in Namibia, where the Herero were nearly decimated in 1904.
Elipses, Mofokeng’s works on sites of spirituality, forms part of a wider enquiry into landscape. Over the years he has produced the series, Man-Made Landscapes, where the focus is on people’s intervention on the land, as you would find at mining sites; and Sad Landscapes, which involves sites where, as he describes it, “spectacular events of horror” were enacted in Europe and Asia.
One of the places photographed while exploring what he calls the “shadow grounds” of Europe was Ravensbrück in Germany, a Nazi concentration camp where about 92 000 women and children died. Another was Auschwitz in Poland, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps. One of his Auschwitz photographs shows a tree-lined lake at Birkenau. On the surface, it seems a tranquil scene, but, following the title, it is the lake where the ashes of cremated concentration camp inmates were thrown. The fact that the history of the landscape is not immediately clear in the picture is exactly what Mofokeng aims for: “I like it,” he says, “when people look at my photos and they can’t work out what my point of view is.”
When Mofokeng began photographing the “shadow grounds” of the world in 1997, what he sought was an answer to how other countries were dealing with places associated with negative memories, so that he could inform local debates. “In South Africa,” he explains, “we were still discussing the fates of Robben Island, Vlakplaas and similarly affected sites at the time. Suffice to say my forays into the metropoles of Europe have convinced me of the futility of this inquiry. There is no universal model to follow. My efforts at this point are tantamount to chasing shadows.”
While images of the township, including those dealing with the billboard as a phenomenon, and landscapes predominate in Invoice, the exhibition also offers an opportunity to view selections from Mofokeng’s other bodies of work. These include The Bloemhof Portfolio, which tell of the lives of tenant farmers in rural Bloemhof; a series on Aids, featuring his family; and another dealing with railway workers fixing a train line on the New York underground.
Invoice is a compelling, must-see exhibition by one of South Africa’s most gifted and creatively intelligent photographers. Mofokeng has a razor-sharp perception and is finely tuned to the historical events, and social and political issues that have shaped our understanding of, not only South Africa, but also the world at large.
This essay was written by Emile Maurice of the Heritage Agency and Pam Warne of Iziko Museums to coincide with Invoice showing at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until March 17 and at the Iziko South African National Gallery until May 2