As early as 2009, inspired by the Andy Warhol Foundation in Pittsburg, Santu Mofokeng entertained the idea of forming a foundation in his name with the express purpose of preserving his photographic legacy. The Santu Mofokeng Foundation was formalised by Santu Mofokeng in 2015, whereupon he donated his photographic work and copyright to the foundation. 

Since 2015, the Santu Mofokeng Foundation has been working as per Santu’s express wishes, not only to preserve his photographic archive, but also to administer his copyright and continue to exhibit and publish his work.

Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020, Johannesburg) is a highly perceptive and significant photographer. From a brief stint as a teenage street photographer, jobs as darkroom assistant and newspaper photographer, to work with the Afrapix Collective documenting the anti-apartheid struggle, Mofokeng’s trajectory offered vital lessons about the power of representation. Increasingly frustrated with overt political photojournalism, he took a job with the African Studies Institute’s Oral History Project and began to photograph home life, street soccer and shebeens. Critical response to his first solo exhibition in 1990 made him question his responsibility to his subjects and led to closer engagement with individuals and communities. Issues of representation are a continuing focus of Mofokeng’s work: Distorting Mirror/Townships Imagined exposes the contrast between media images and private work; Black Photo Album/Look At Me 1890–1950 considers identity and personal projection in portraits; and an exhibition Mofokeng curated with Thierry Secretan, Compound to Kraal, analyses historical representations of mineworkers and bosses.

Other major themes are cultural memory and the spirit of place – the exploration of people’s psychological relationship with an environment, and the influence of environment on individual lives and identities. Many images probe the weight of meaning in, for example, night vigils, torture cells, urban areas and industrial landscapes. Bloemhof Portfolio shows the oppressive landscape of tenant farming. Chasing Shadows captures the atmosphere of religious gatherings in caves, fields and under motorways. Rethinking Landscapes informs the debate around monuments and memory of sites of massacre and concentration camps, taking it beyond Africa to Auschwitz, Hanoi and Nagasaki. Mofokeng’s work is a significant contribution to understanding and research on human development in the South African context.

Santu Mofokeng is honoured for the outstanding quality and content of his work, for his refiguration of the powers of photographic representation, for his acute insight into the cultural meanings in landscapes and the reciprocal relations of environment and development, and for his significant contribution to photography in Africa.

From the 2009 Prince Claus Awards Committee Report

Santu Mofokeng was born in Johannesburg in 1956. Although starting his career as a press and documentary photographer, joining the famed photographic collective Afrapix in 1985, he would later prefer the mantel of artist. His deviation from conventional subject matter includes photographic enquiries into spirituality, the first explorations thereof resulting in the well-known series, Train Church, documenting commuter church services on the trains from Soweto to Johannesburg in 1986. This interest in the ethereal nature of spirituality continued throughout his photographic career and produced the extraordinary, evocative series Chasing Shadows.

In his lifetime Mofokeng was the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. In 1991 he won the Ernest Cole Scholarship, to study at the International Centre for Photography in New York. He was awarded the first Mother Jones Award for Africa in 1992. In 1998 Mofokeng was the recipient of the Künstlerhaus Worpswede Fellowship and three years later of the DAAD Fellowship, both in Germany. In 2009 he was nominated as a Prince Claus Fund Laureate for Visual Arts.

Santu Mofokeng’s international retrospective, ‘Santu Mofokeng: Chasing Shadows - Thirty Years of Photographic Essays’, opened in May 2011 at the Jeu de Paume Paris and subsequently travelled to Kunsthalle Bern in the latter part of 2011 and Bergen Kunsthall and the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg in 2012. In May 2013 he participated in the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennalle di Venezia on the German Pavilion. In February 2016 it was announced that Mofokeng was the winner of the first International Photography prize established by the Fondazione Fotografia Modena.

Santu Mofokeng was an avid reader and lover of books so it seems fitting that in May 2019 the German publisher Steidl released an 18 book box set, made in collaboration with Mofokeng, exploring his entire oeuvre as one of South Africa’s most important photographers.

Santu Mofokeng passed away on 26 January 2020 at the age of 63.