In 1988 Santu Mofokeng joined the staff of the African Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand as a documentary photographer and began to record the lives of tenant laborers in the unremarkable township of Bloemhof. Over the next several years Mofokeng amassed what could be considered the core of his larger body of work - a set of interconnected photo-essays centering on the Maine family, with whom he stayed. Highly distilled yet immersive, Books 2 through 4 of the series Santu Mofokeng Stories form a loose trilogy that describes how the residents of Bloemhof unwind, bury one of their own, and gathered together on one of the most consequential days in South African history.

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, open-ended 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 the Jeu de Paume in Paris before traveling internationally, and in 2013 he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale.