Santu Mofokeng was born in Johannesburg in 1956. After working as a darkroom assistant for various newspapers, he joined Afrapix, a collective of photographers dedicated to the struggle against apartheid. His interest in depicting ordinary township life, however, led him to work for the African Studies Institute at Wits University from 1988 until 1998. Over the past three decades, Mofokeng has created an exceptional, open-ended body of work that probes the meaning and authority of photography while subverting stereotypical notions of the black South African experience. In 2011 a retrospective of Mofokeng’s work opened at the Jeu de Paume in Paris before traveling internationally, and in 2013 he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. Santu Mofokeng died in January 2020.