About Pieter Hugo

Born on Friday 29th October 1976 and is 43 years old, He was born in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Pieter Hugo is a self-taught photographer when he picked up his fathers at the age of 10, on his 12th birthday in 1988 he got given a camera and made him become curious. With the First image that Hugo, printed was homeless men with his work being ‘p’oltical with showing the problems of the world (O’Hagan, 2008).  

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His 1^st projects that Hugo worked on was by attending a political rally to understand what is going on with South Africa with him investigating his own curiosity. One of his first serious undertakings was capturing the aftermath of the riots that followed the 1993 assassination of ANC leader Chris Hani (Montgomery, 2011). Hugo works as a contemporary artist in South Africa whose projects have addressed “issues of class, identity, violence, and privilege (ArtNet, 2019)” This has been done when he has documented people who have been marginalized and downtrodden in parts of Africa. The regions include South-Africa, Rwanda and Nigeria with the subjects being Hyena tamers, albinos and children who survived the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 with it being a project of Portraits of Reconciliation.

Hugo’s, authorship “fuelled by his awareness of vestigial Apartheid—his white privilege providing him with the ability to produce contemporary photography, while prohibiting him from ever accessing the experience of black Africans. (ArtNet, 2019)” This is important to understand that he wants to photograph what he once to advantage of and not having to be part of the negativity surrounding his subjects. He wants all of his photos that he has worked to be made public.

Hugo uses a medium format and large format camera with the use of the chromatic palette has made his photos have a hyper-realistic factor with huge definition, by the use of having a harsh studio lighting.  The way his prints come out it has been described of seeing ourselves as, John Berger has spoken about before, through awkward situations that he has done though we are complicit as a viewer. Like Bruce Gildon, it is about focusing on people’s defects, imperfections with race playing a factor here. When people look at some of his work it sheds our masks in what we see in life. (GLAVIANO, 2013)

Figure 7 The hyena & other men (2007)

The way Pieter Hugo has gone around working the road trip he normally starts with a theme when before he starts is by drawing inspiration from over photographs. Hugo normally photographs his subjects over “over two-week stretches” He shoots over this time period when on the road so “I can keep my eye fresh” as over the time you can lose all meaning with what is going as Hugo learned when working on Rwanda with him being “desensitized and acclimatized” to the problematic situations. In 2009 Hugo, shot Permeant Error this done on over

“two trips of two weeks each” in order for Hugo, to clear his head. In 2008 Hugo, worked on Nollywood and this was shot on 4 trips

All direct quotes and paragraph from (Ruhkamp, 2018, pp. 3,10):

When Hugo was working on Rwanda 1994 he used the road trip with painstaking effort to make sure that he could get to sides of the coin when it comes to nature where it is all beautiful and calm while negative things can happen. The locations were in remote villages of South Africa and Rwanda the locations were hidden from most people apart from the people who understand the locations. This sanctioned the photographers to be raw with having a crystal-clear meaning of the location, where at times “something beautiful and innocent can sometimes come out of something terrible.” (Public Delivery, 2018)

The way that Pieter Hugo went around creating the road trip has allowed his work to stand out and become strong.