Anyway: Santu Mofokeng's laughter

Santu Mofokeng, Buddhist Retreat near Pietermaritzburg, ­ Kwa-Zulu Natal, 2003

If the SPCA ever needed a photographer I would recommend Santu Mofokeng. Then again, I’m not sure the SPCA would want him. Not that the Johannesburg-born photographer is cruel to animals or anything, it’s just that the chickens and goats in his austere black and white photographs don’t posses what you might call sentimentality, that essential mushiness needed for selling the SPCA to the general public.

Mofokeng is not one for soppy pictures. His photographs are calculated and precise, even if they’re about things that are not that easy to photograph. Things like history, memory, magic and spirituality.

Take, for example, his photo of a horse foraging in a wood. Taken in 2003 at a Buddhist retreat he visited near Pietermaritzburg, I found the photo tucked away in a corner of Johannesburg’s Standard Bank Gallery, where the photographer recently showed (July 31 – September 1, 2007).

The work is spellbinding, never mind Happy from Hillbrow’s observation in the visitor’s book that Mofokeng’s work is “depressing and dull”. The picture is also strangely macabre. Photographed in semi-shade, the contrasting light tricks one into believing the horse is without a head.

The photographer is leading a walkabout of his Johannesburg show, and is surrounded by a group of young hipsters who nervously titter when the photographer cracks a joke, which is often. Mofokeng tells us that what we are seeing is “magic”. Standing just askance his earliest body of work, a series on religious worshippers catching the Soweto train in the late 1980s, he directs us to look at a large picture of two goats. On the flat picture plane the one goat appears to be standing on the other.

“It is an optical illusion,” he says, his slender frame fitted into a pair of jeans, the chest pocket of his button shirt showing the contours of a box of smokes. He suddenly swivels around and points to the horse, the first in a trilogy of oversized magic pictures.

“Have you ever seen a horse with three legs and no head?”

Before anyone can answer, he turns again, this time to face a giant-sized portrait of a middle-aged man. It is not just any man: he is a holy man, a sangoma, Ishmael Mofokeng, the photographer’s brother. He died of Aids-related complications in 2004.

“I don’t know if his eyes are open and shut,” he says, pointing to pair of ghostly eyes that seem to be both open and shut at the same time. Magic.

The picture becomes the source of a story. In matter of fact language Mofokeng tells how, on his brother’s insistence, he drove him to Salpeterkraans, a sandstone overhang near Fouriesburg in the hills of the southeastern Free State. The area is a place of ancestral worship. Mofokeng explains how his brother, severely disabled by his sickness, had to be pushed in a wheelbarrow to the cave.

“They gave him water and holy ash. He felt better and said thank you.” It was during this moment of respite that Mofokeng took his picture. Afterwards, they both walked back to the car. “It didn’t take him long and he was dead.” He pauses. “Anyway.”

Mofokeng turns and walks off in the direction of an unrelated series of photographs, landscape photographs of unholy places like Birkenau, Krakow and Aushwitz. Trailing behind him, I chew on that final word of his. Anyway.

If there is any truth to be got from a journalistic profile, and many would dispute that there is, I think it is to be found in the fragment, a moment sectioned off from the whole and spotlighted, a moment exaggerated. In Mofokeng’s case, that moment arrives when he blithely says, “anyway”.

Two years ago, when I met him at his Bez Valley home to talk about his portrait of Ishmael, I found the photographer slumped in his driveway. He looked forlorn, lost – not at all dissimilar the picture of his deceased brother.

“I think about my family,” he mumbled. “I think about my kids. I think about what I try to do. I get pissed off. It is really hard. I live in a time when relationships are defined by who has and who doesn’t have money. I don’t like that. I feel very depressed. I hate the time in which I live. It is depressing. I am divorced, and have kids who do not live with me. I was crying just before you came. I was asking myself, Who am I? What am I doing? Why do I do what I do? It hurts. I was crying all day. I am not in good shape.”

Two years later and this raconteur photographer who began his professional career in a newspaper darkroom is in much better shape. “Anyway,” he says.

Of course this is how he is: charismatic and contradictory, comical and sometimes just plain callous. A few years ago I travelled to Tokyo with a bunch of South African photographers, Mofokeng included. One evening, the bunch of us squeezed into an impossibly small booth at a Shinjuku restaurant, he drunkenly told Zwelethu Mthethwa that Chris Ledochowski took better pictures of townships than he did. Mthethwa choked, Mofokeng laughed. He often laughs.

A few months prior to our Tokyo trip, at a public talk in Rosebank, I was also at the receiving end of his scorn. Midway through some or other point I was trying to make a voice started mumbling in the crowd. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was Mofokeng, a man whose soft-spoken telephone voice is quieter than that of Guy Tillim, which is quite something.

He is not immune his biting criticism. In his 2001 monograph, perhaps the best book in David Krut’s ongoing TAXI Art Books series, Mofokeng concludes a fragmentary essay, equal parts autobiography and artist statement, by recalling a moment from his divorce.

“I listen to the proceedings, quietly, waiting for my turn at the stand. An unflattering portrait of me is being painted in words. I am hoping for a kind word, a refrain, or a ‘but’, even. The picture of me that emerges is that of a drunk and violent man.” The divorce is granted. “I walk her to her place of work. I don’t know what I am feeling at the time. I go home and make a few calls to friends and relatives. They tell me how to feel.”

Anyway. Well no, not anyway. When Mofokeng says anyway, when he walks away from Ishmael to the haunted landscapes of modern history, it is hard to believe that it is without a sense of deep-seated emotion buried somewhere in his chest. But then again this is just an exhibition, right? And anyway, we’re done with animals and stuff.

A young Soweto hipster asks the impish figure leading the session what Vlakplaas is. Mofokeng laughs. He often laughs.

(This article appeared in a September 2007 edition of Sunday Time's Lifestyle supplement. The photographer called me afterwards to thank me for the "nice obituary".)