A dense fog covers the shacks and electrical pylons of Tembisa, a township on Johannesburg’s East Rand, as a teenager, hands sunk deep into pockets, slumps across a dusty and desolate landscape. Above him towers a billboard for OMO washing powder, an ominous monument to capital amidst apparent deprivation. Taken in 1991, the image “Winter in Tembisa” is one of the late South African photographer Santu Mofokeng’s most haunting.

Mofokeng, who died in January at the age of 63, is perhaps best known for his images of South African township life in the 1980s and 1990s. He left behind a rich visual archive that captured the complexity of everyday life under apartheid and the contradictions of the post-apartheid era. From his Train Church series to his images of families fragmented by the HIV epidemic, his work was varied. While other greats in the South African photographic canon are often associated with a specific body of work—David Goldblatt’s portraits of Afrikaners or Peter Magubane’s images of the Soweto protests—Mofokeng’s work was diverse and enigmatic. Part of what interests me about him lies behind the lens though, specifically how he approached his subjects and the politics of representation.

Mofokeng began his career as a street photographer in the 1970s. In the early 1980s he landed a job in the darkroom of the Afrikaans Beeld newspaper before he joined the famed Afrapix collective which documented the struggle against apartheid and included, among others Omar Badsha, Cedric Nunn, and Gisèle Wulfsohn. He later went on to become a staff photographer for the New Nation newspaper and joined the African Studies Institute at Wits University, where he spent a decade collecting photographs of South Africa’s forgotten black middle classes (a project that became the critically acclaimed The Black Photo Album) and documenting the lives of tenant farmers.

His role in Afrapix placed him among the vanguard of South Africa’s so-called struggle photographers, those who captured both the oppression of apartheid and resistance against it. Yet Mofokeng was uncomfortable with photography that glorified resistance, replicated victimhood and obscured the complexity of township life. As the photography critic Annabelle Wienand has noted, Mofokeng’s aim was to question the role of photography in documenting the South African black experience. This involved rejecting one-dimensional depictions of black life and correcting the visual archive by depicting townships and their residents in all of their complexity:

You look at the photographs that have been made of the people, say, in the township …they are poor, they are angry, they are not normal, they are not “people” in a sense, they are victims. If I make photographs that show a certain sector of the people, say the oppressed, in a way that makes them human, makes them “normal”, it might convince the other section, maybe more right-wing, if they look at the photograph and see that they are just people like us, they want the same things that we do.

Mofokeng was deeply concerned with how his images were read by different audiences. He grappled with this in a 1992 exhibit Distorting Mirror/Townships Imagined, where he contrasted images of township life taken for the media with portraits he had taken for people to display in their homes.

“What is left out of the frame,” he wrote, “ignores the rich and full lives which are not regarded as absences by the people in the townships. Journalists often focus on what is lacking in places.” His comments evoke Jacob Dlamini’s argument in Native Nostalgia, that life under apartheid was not a moral desert for black South Africans; there were moments of joy and sadness amid oppression and resistance. For Dlamini, as for Mofokeng, townships were too often sites that were examined rather than experienced. International audiences were interested in photographs of township struggle funerals, not the complexity of these places and their residents.

This concern with detail and reflexivity made Mofokeng a skilled ethnographic photographer. Part of this came from his own positionality. After all, he was documenting communities that he was very much a part of. Another came from his work at Wits University, where he collaborated with a team of social researchers on the lives of rural labour tenants in Bloemhof in the southwestern Transvaal—a history described in considerable detail in Charles van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985, for which Mofokeng contributed photographs.

His eye for detail and his understanding of the relationships between people and place allowed him to produce some of his most powerful images. His interest in spirituality, for example, began with the Train Church series, which revealed how segregated transit systems also provided spaces for spiritual rituals. Between 1996 and 2014 he photographed worshippers, including his own brother, at the Motouleng and Mautse caves near Clarens, in the Free State. What became the Chasing Shadows series is a reckoning with the crisis of spirituality after the end of apartheid. If spirituality allowed many to confront the burden of apartheid, post-apartheid spirituality involved new and more intangible foes, most notably the scourge of HIV/AIDS, a reason many sought solace and guidance in the caves.

My first encounter with Mofokeng’s work was in Donald Donham’s 2011 book, Violence in A Time of Liberation: Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, an ethnographic account of how violence emerged not from ethnic tensions but shifting workplace relations and political divisions among mine workers after the end of apartheid. Mofokeng’s accompanying images depict the lives of mine workers in all their richness, at the rockface and in the compounds, but also in union meetings and beer halls.

I asked Donham, now a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, about their collaboration on the project and Mofokeng’s photographic method: