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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2025
In his immense monograph, Chasing Shadows, South African photographer Santu Mofokeng begins the discussion of his 1991–2006 photographic series Township Billboards by asserting:
Billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the denizens of townships since the beginning. The billboard is a fact and feature of township landscape. It is a relic from the times when Africans were subjects of power and the township was a restricted area, subject to laws, municipality by-laws and ordinances regulating people’s movements and governing who may or may not enter the township. It is without irony when I say that billboards can be used as reference points when plotting the history and development of the township. Billboards capture and encapsulate ideology, the social, economic and political climate at any given time. They retain their appeal for social engineering.
Taking my cue from Mofokeng’s careful observation of place – as well as from philosopher Jacques Rancière’s insistence in The Emancipated Spectator on the capacity of artworks to make us alive to the social, spatial and aesthetic dynamics present in the world – in this chapter, I consider street photography as an engagement with meaning-making in the public sphere.
More particularly, my interest lies in the iconic works of Mofokeng and fellow South African photographer Guy Tillim and their propositions of public space – through their photography – which work against the ways we overlook or stop seeing our surroundings. Put differently, my interest is in street photography as public intervention, an inquiry into adaptive strategies that continue to be a function of self-preservation and survival in post-apartheid South Africa.My exploration of Mofokeng and Tillim considers how they challenge these adaptive strategies, asking us to look again, reconsider and re-make, so that we may be sensitised to what lies openly in our midst.
In their 2012 paper ‘Counterspaces’, Andrew Case and Carla Hunter define ‘adaptive strategies’ of marginalised individuals as the means by which these individuals maintain their selfhood in oppressive conditions, observing:
Adaptive responding . . . is the multidimensional psychosocial process occurring at the individual and setting level, which facilitates, in marginalized individuals, the capacity to circumvent, resist, counteract and/or mitigate the psychological consequences of oppression . . . Adaptive responding can be thought of as having the ultimate goal of protecting and enhancing the self-concept and, in so doing, promoting psychological well-being in marginalized individuals.
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