テート・ギャラリーさんのインスタグラム写真 - (テート・ギャラリーInstagram)「Get to know... Santu Mofokeng 📷 Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020) began his career as a photojournalist in South Africa in the early 1980s. At the time, many of his colleagues were chasing stories on the front line as pressure mounted on the white minority government to dismantle apartheid. However, even then Mofokeng worked at his own pace. Slowed down by his inability to drive a car and, in his words, unable to ‘make the deadlines’, he would print late into the night. While this frustrated editors at the daily newspapers, Mofokeng was better suited to oulets which provided in-depth coverage of the week’s stories rather than breaking news. ‘Being slow became a strength for me' he recalled. In 1988 he was hired as a photographer by the African Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. The artist began to question why he was taking the pictures, and for whom. The experiences of his audience, white middle-class people living in wealthier parts of Johannesburg, were far removed from those of his subjects. He proposed an exhibition about Soweto and while researching this project, discovered old black-and-white family photographs in Soweto homes that he ‘could not relate to’. It was these images which ultimately led him to create 'The Black Photo Album Look at Me 1997' (pictured here). This work consists of slides including scans of photographs Mofokeng collected from families across South Africa. The portraits of Black families in European dress were taken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and are unusual because they appear to have been either commissioned or sanctioned by the sitters, whereas most photographs taken of Black people in South Africa during that period were of coerced subjects and served as mementos for the traders, missionaries and colonialists. Mofokeng asks repeatedly: ‘Are these images evidence of mental colonisation or did they serve to challenge prevailing images of “The African” in the Western world?’ The Black Photo Album Look at Me is currently on loan to Musée de Quai Branly (Paris, France). Click the link in our bio to learn more.」10月14日 3時18分