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.