Train Church

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 signifi cant 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.

Santu Mofokeng was born in Johannesburg in 1956. After working as a darkroom assistant for various newspapers, he joined Afrapix, a collective of photographers dedicated to the struggle against apartheid. His interest in depicting ordinary township life, however, led him to work for the African Studies Institute at Wits University as a documentary photographer and researcher from 1988 until 1998. Over the past three decades, Mofokeng has created an incomparable, openended body of work that probes the meaning and authority of photographic images while subverting stereotypical notions of the black South African experience. In 2011 a retrospective of Mofokeng's work opened at Jeu de Paume in Paris before traveling internationally, and in 2013 he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale.