Santu Mofokeng was born in Johannesburg in 1956 and lives in Soweto when he is not on his working visits to Europe. He started work as a street photographer in Soweto, but in the early 1980s, during a time of accelerated political activism, embarked on a career in documentary photography. Having won several awards, and staged numerous exhibitions in the interim, Mofokeng has become one of South Africa's foremost photographers. Engaging subjects as visually diverse as religious ritual, black middle-class identities, and the signifying potential of landscape, he upsets the comfort zones of racial and cultural memory, always foregrounding the ideological role of representation. For this title he has made a selection of 76 of his extraordinary images to complement his autobiographical writings which make up the majority of the text.
