Forbidden City, China

Here, Santu Mofokeng captured a worker cleaning Mao Zedong’s massive portrait, which hangs at the gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Mao founded the People’s Republic of China and served as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Mofokeng began taking photographs as a teenager on the streets of Soweto, the Johannesburg township in which he grew up. In the 1980s he joined Afrapix, a photographers’ collective dedicated to documenting South African society under apartheid. Mofokeng turned away from overtly political photography in the 1990s, instead producing photographic essays that more subtly explored South African communities, Black spiritual life, and controversial sites of historical violence.