A leading South African artist working in photography, Ractliffe received the premier national art prize, Vita, in 1999. An eloquent and perceptive monograph on her work and practice, Jo.Ractliffe by Brenda Atkinson, was published in 2000. Jo Ractliffe probes photography for fragments, interstices, and absences, rather than for capturing presences and decisive moments. Many of her series evoke loss, and its relationships to identity, memory, desire, and death.

For Ractliffe, "Photography is a very resistant and resisting medium to work with, a medium of non-disclosure. Despite this, we retain a certain belief in the truth of apearances; we conflate the real with its representation. I'm interested in that space of slippage between photography and the real, and in the notion of trace. But I'm also interested in the things that happen outside of the frame -the not so obvious, the furtive things that are not easily imagined." Ractliffe often mines the apparently banal for evocation. In Ractliffe's Guess who loves you series, she iconizes and aestheticizes toys chewed by her dog, Gus. These become metaphors for the gnawing of desire, which is never satiated, and "a desire to please that shifts uneasily from love, to ingratiation, to abjection" (Atkinson p.40).

Vlakplaas is the name of the farm where an apartheid-era death squad tortured and murdered pro-democracy activists. Ractliffe's images at the site reveal no evidence of the horrors that occurred here. The photograph as an evidentiary document fails; it is silent. Instead the images bespeak the unspeakable that lurks behind banal mask of horror. Ractliffe's influence as a leading practitioner of photo-based art in South African art has been extended through her teaching and publications.