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Santu Mofokeng
The Black Album / Look at Me 1890-1950
ISBN: 9783869303109
(PB - E)
€
With the so-called civilised workers, almost without exception their civilisation was only skin deep. O. Pirow, quoting South African Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog For this book Santu Mofokeng collected private photographs which urban black working and middle-class families in South Africa commissioned between 1890 and 1950, a time when the government was creating policies towards those designated as natives. Painterly in style, the images evoke the artifices of Victorian photography. Some of them are fiction, a creation of the artist in terms of setting, props, clothing and pose yet there is no evidence of coercion. We believe these images, as they reveal something about how these people imagined themselves. In this work Mofokeng analyses the sensibilities, aspirations and self-image of the black population and its desire for representation and social recognition in times of colonial rule and suppression. The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 18901950 is drawn from an ongoing research project of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Santu Mofokeng was born in Johannesburg in 1956 and began his career as a street photographer in Soweto during the apartheid era. Having received the Ernest Cole Scholarship in 1991, he studied at the International Centre for Photography in New York. In 1998 Mofokeng received the Ku¨nstlerhaus Worpswede Fellowship and in 2002 a DAAD Fellowship in Berlin. His first international retrospective opened in May 2011 at Jeu de Paume in Paris. Mofokeng lives and works in Johannesburg.
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