Looking at a Santu Mofokeng photograph is often a lesson in slowing down. His images do not rely on spectacle or the dramatic weight of suffering to capture attention. Instead, they ask viewers to spend time with the people inside the frame, to recognise their humanity beyond the circumstances they lived through and to understand that while apartheid shaped their lives, it never fully defined who they were.
For many South Africans who came of age during the 1980s and early 1990s, photography was often synonymous with struggle. Newspapers and magazines were filled with images of police violence, mass funerals, political rallies and communities locked in confrontation with an oppressive state.
The photographs documented a reality that many people, particularly outside South Africa, needed to see. They also created a visual language through which black life became increasingly associated with conflict, resistance and pain.
It was into this landscape that Soweto-born photographer Santu Mofokeng emerged, bringing with him a way of seeing that felt radically different because he was less interested in photographing history as an event and more interested in photographing life as it was being lived by ordinary people trying to make sense of the world around them.
In the documentary, Santu Mofokeng, directed and produced by Minky Schlesinger, the photographer reflects on a moment that altered the way he approached his work, recalling how after photographing Soweto and exhibiting the photographs at the Market Theatre, “I realised that the realities of Soweto that I represent in the photographs do not necessarily translate”, he says in the film.
The statement might appear simple on the surface but buried in it is a profound challenge that has troubled generations of photographers, journalists and documentary makers: who gets to interpret an image and what happens when the people being photographed are not the same people consuming the work?
Mofokeng would go on to explain that the people who lived in Soweto often did not recognise themselves in the photographs that outsiders found compelling, a revelation that forced him to confront the uncomfortable possibility that photographs can sometimes tell the truth while missing it.
“This sensitised me about the problem that I make photographs but people who view my work do not necessarily come from Soweto,” he says.
The question that followed would become one of the defining concerns of his career. If photography was going to be meaningful, if it was going to carry any real value beyond galleries, institutions and newspaper pages, then surely it had to matter to the people whose lives it was documenting?
What followed was an expansion of what documentary photography could be. Instead of focusing exclusively on moments of crisis, Mofokeng turned his attention towards moments that rarely attracted public attention, moments that were often too ordinary for newspapers and too subtle for headlines but contained the essence of people’s lives.
He photographed families gathered inside modest homes whose walls carried the accumulated memories of generations.
He photographed church congregations finding spiritual refuge in a country determined to deny them dignity.
He photographed people at shebeens laughing, dancing and momentarily forgetting the burdens they carried.
He photographed workers travelling, neighbours talking and communities gathering, not because the scenes were extraordinary but because they were not.
What makes the photographs so powerful is that they refuse to reduce people to symbols.
The men and women who appear in Mofokeng’s images are neither presented as victims waiting to be rescued nor transformed into heroic archetypes designed to serve a political narrative. They exist as people in all their complexity, carrying joy and disappointment, tenderness and frustration, ambition and uncertainty, often in the same frame.
Perhaps that is why his work continues to resonate decades after many of the photographs were first made. While the political realities that shaped them belong to a particular moment in history, the emotions in them remain remarkably familiar because they speak to experiences that transcend time: the desire to belong, the need to be seen, the search for meaning and the determination to preserve one’s dignity even under difficult circumstances.
The commitment to documenting lives beyond the narrow confines of struggle photography is perhaps most evident in Rumours/2026, showing at the Standard Bank Art Lab in Sandton, the first exhibition after his death in 2020.
The exhibition unfolds across three bodies of work that, while produced at different moments in Mofokeng’s career, speak to one another in profound ways.
The first, The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890–1950, is composed of studio portraits collected by Mofokeng over many years. Commissioned by black working- and middle-class families, the photographs exist largely outside official archives and institutional collections, yet they offer one of the most compelling visual records of black South African life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Looking at the portraits, one is immediately struck by the intention behind them. Families dressed in their finest clothes carefully composed themselves before the camera, aware that the image being made would probably outlive them.
The exhibition then moves into Concert at Sewefontein, a series that traces a moment of collective release among farmworkers and tenant labourers. Photographed in low light and often filled with movement, the images capture bodies folding into one another through dance, music and celebration. The photographs seem to exist somewhere between documentation and memory, where motion softens the edges of the frame and time itself appears to loosen.
What emerges is an atmosphere and a reminder of the ways communities create joy and belonging even in difficult circumstances.
The viewer is left with the sense that the most important thing happening in the photograph exists in the relationships and emotions moving through the space.
If Concert at Sewefontein explores moments of gathering and release, Labour Tenancies returns to the quieter rhythms of everyday life.
Produced during Mofokeng’s research with tenant farming communities, the photographs are rooted in the textures of ordinary existence, revealing landscapes and lives shaped by labour, displacement and historical inequality.
Yet what makes the work remarkable is its refusal to simplify the realities. The images hold intimacy and distance. They reveal familiarity while acknowledging estrangement. They document communities shaped by apartheid without reducing them to apartheid alone.
Across all three bodies of work, Mofokeng remains interested in the same question: How do people see themselves and how do they wish to be seen?
Whether photographing a family portrait from a century ago, a gathering of farmworkers in celebration or the daily realities of tenant farming communities, his attention consistently returns to the dignity, complexity and humanity of ordinary people.
It is this quality that gives the work its enduring power. The photographs are not merely records of the past. They remain alive because the people in them continue to speak.
Rumours/2026 is running at the Standard Bank Art Lab in Sandton, Johannesburg, until 18 October.