Santu Mofokeng’s generation took documentary photography seriously. They developed the practice and popularised it, inspiring the next young crop of photographers with Andrew Tshabangu and Ruth Motau among them.
Documentary photography calls on its practitioners to technically master the art of photography, but also to harness its potential to tell powerful stories that mark historically important events.
The power of photographic narrative is demonstrated at the current exhibition of Mofokeng’s work, Rumours /2026, which previewed on April 23 at the Standard Bank Lab, Mandela Square, Sandton.
“The exhibition runs until October 18. We wanted it to coincide with the Latitudes Art Fair. We felt that the work would resonate with the title Rumours /2026,” said Dr Same Mdluli, Standard Bank Lab curator and manager and one of the co-curators of the show along with Lunetta Bartz on behalf of the Santu Mofokeng Foundation.
Mofokeng, born in Johannesburg in 1956, was raised in Soweto. He was a street photographer who later joined Afrapix, a progressive photographers’ collective and photographic agency established by Omar Badsha, Lesley Lawson and a small group of black and white photographers and political activists in 1981. He then became a researcher at Wits, focusing on how black life was captured in photographs.
Rumours /2026 is the first exhibition of Mofokeng’s work since his death on January 26, 2020 at the age of 63. The exhibition is a record of aspects of black life under apartheid before 1994. In that year, democracy was ushered in with a vote for all eligible South Africans irrespective of colour. He took other photographs as well between 1994 and 1997.
The exhibition has three segments: black tenant labourers under apartheid, ordinary black people as they marked important events like weddings, and workers trying to escape the reality of toiling for a pittance on white-owned farms.
The segment, 1988 to 1997, covers the areas of Bloemhof Farm and surrounding communities of the Vaal, south of Joburg, where Mofokeng spent time with the communities. The section has three components titled Concert at Sewefontein, Labour Tenancies and Black Photo Album 1890-1950. Black Photo Album contains portraits of black people dating from the 19th century to the 1950s. Mofokeng collected these from families, retouched some of them and framed them for exhibition. Some of the photographs were commissioned by black working- and middle-class families as early as the 19th century. The images exist outside official archives, which makes them an important anthropological and historical asset. Of course, they weren’t made for public exhibition but for interior decoration or private circulation among relatives and friends.
Concert at Sewefontein traces moments of relief. The images were taken at a gathering of farmworkers during downtime together away from the weight of fieldwork. The atmosphere of release and enjoyment is discernible.
The last section is Labour Tenancies. It anchors the exhibition, showing everyday life in the communities. He created this body of work while doing research for the African Studies Institute at Wits University. The images are a reminder that black people refused to be defined by the restrictions placed on them by apartheid, yet he doesn’t reduce the lives of this community to a spectacle of resistance.
Bartz said at the opening: “This exhibition marks the 10 year anniversary of the formation of the Santu Mofokeng Foundation, offering the South African public the opportunity to appreciate a focused selection of some of his most significant work. To me, the most compelling aspect was the opportunity to give equal weight to Mofokeng’s writing, which critically informed his photographic process.”
“Rumours /2026 brings us into proximity with the way that images live beyond their making,” said Mdluli. ”In Mofokeng’s work, we encounter photography not as a fixed record, but as a space that’s relative, where memory, imagination and lived experience converge. They don’t show a singular history, but a set of positions from which black life has been seen, shaped and self-articulated. The exhibition invites us to consider how images travel, what they carry and how they continue to return to us, asking to be read differently.”
Rumours/2026 runs from April 23 - 18 October, 2026 at Standard Bank Art Lab, Shop 33-34, Nelson Mandela Square, 2 Maud Street, Sandton.
This article was first published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
