Santu Mofokeng – Stories 1, 2, 3, 4 SET (*Hurt)
Train Church | Concert at Sewefontein | Funeral | 27 April 1994
Our Santu Mofokeng Stories SET consists of the following publications:
Santu Mofokeng – Stories 1. Train Church
Joshua Chuang, Lunetta Bartz (ed.). Steidl 2015. Text in English. 96 pages, 54 ills. 24 x 32 cm. 450 g. Softcover in slipcase. ISBN 9783869309712
List price € 28,–
Santu Mofokeng – Stories 2, 3, 4. Concert at Sewefontein | Funeral | 27 April 1994
Three softcovers in an envelope. Joshua Chuang (ed.). Steidl 2016. Text in English. 112 pages, 24 x 32 cm. 746 g. Softcover in slipcase. ISBN 9783958291041
List price € 45,–
Over the course of a few weeks in 1986, aboard the crowded and precarious Soweto-Johannesburg train he took to and from his job as a darkroom printer, Santu Mofokeng photographed a ritual he witnessed daily.
His fellow commuters, working-class residents from the surrounding townships, would spontaneously begin to sing. Bible-wielding preachers would sermonize, prayers would be uttered, and murmurs would gradually build into a raucous chorus replete with clapping, bell-ringing, dancing, and improvised drums.
“These pictures capture two of the most significant features of South African life,” Mofokeng says, “the experience of commuting (migrancy) and the pervasiveness of spirituality.” The first of a defining series of photo-essays by Mofokeng that Steidl will release in the coming years, Train Church is the photographer’s earliest long-form story—newly revised and expanded, and brought palpably to life in an oversize format.
In 1988 Santu Mofokeng joined the staff of the African Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand as a documentary photographer and began to record the lives of tenant laborers in the unremarkable township of Bloemhof. Over the next several years Mofokeng amassed what could be considered the core of his larger body of work — a set of interconnected photo-essays centering on the Maine family, with whom he stayed.
Highly distilled yet immersive, Books 2 through 4 of the series Santu Mofokeng Stories form a loose trilogy that describes how the residents of Bloemhof unwind, bury one of their own, and gathered together on one of the most consequential days in South African history.