Pieter Hugo
An interview with South African photographer Pieter Hugo: "I'm interested in photography because it sits somewhere between document and art"
December 6, 2013 7:30 A
by Alessia Glaviano
As if he placed a magnifying lens between ourselves and the uncomfortable scenarios he portrays in his photographs, through his images Pieter satisfies our voyeuristic needs and allows us to linger our eyes long enough on details that, in everyday life, we would not dare to look at with so much attention – think about people’s physical defects, imperfections and diversity generally speaking.
Looking at some of his pictures, I start pondering over the characteristic of photography (and art generally speaking) to transfigure what would unsettle us in real life, that disquieting element that repulses and captivates us at the same time triggering an interest which is imbued with sense of guilt and the inability to turn away: to say it simply, Hugo sheds our mask.
Pieter Hugo started taking pictures very young; he received his first camera from his father at the age of 12 and, once he finished school, aged 20, he decided to turn photography into his career.
In early 2000 Hugo worked a few years at Fabrica, in Italy, cooperating with Oliviero Toscani, an experience that contributed hugely to the shaping of his artistic vision: “At that time Toscani was making some fantastic images – he really understood, I think, economy and imagery, he had this way of an incredible direct communication. With art he knew: if it’s not essential with what you are showing, leave it out of the picture.“
The themes addressed by Pieter are many and always connected to his region: as he admitted himself, in South Africa it is very difficult to produce works that are not political in some way or another. The inspiration comes, most of the time, from what it is portrayed by the media: for instance, the acclaimed 2007 series entitled “The Hyena & Other Men” was developed as a result of an image featured in a blog, the 2004 work on Rwanda “Vestiges of a Genocide” was inspired by an article appeared on the Economist while the 2008-09 series “Nollywood” – by the movies he had watched during a trip to Nigeria.
His project, “Kin”, which he has worked on for the last seven years, is very different from the one he has produced so far: it is an introspective, intimate and personal work which features a self-portrait, images of his wife when she was pregnant and of his newly born daughter, his family and friends alongside images of homeless people, vagrants, domestic staff who worked for Hugo’s family and South African people he met on the street or portrayed their houses.
Kin is an anthropological and psychological study on the diverse population that lives in South Africa, on the profound scarring left by colonialism and apartheid and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in a continent worn out by violence and injustice. Hugo described his project Kin using these words: “an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being ‘colonial driftwood’… South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place. It is a very violent society and the scars of colonialism and apartheid still run very deep. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society, and the legacy of forced racial segregation casts a long shadow… How does one live in this society? How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent should one try? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing. This work attempts to address these questions and to reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives. I have deeply mixed feelings about being here. I am interested in the places where these narratives collide. Kin is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society’s ideals and its realities.”
Hugo’s artistic journey shows a clear will to investigate the themes of his works from a psychological point of view, the ability to think and question (and encourage us to do the same) and to unmask the contradictions and limitations of society through photography. The depth and breadth of content in Hugo’s photographs is always matched by the care and attention he pours in the composition and aesthetics and this often puzzles the viewer.
Pieter tells me he is particularly attracted by the intrinsic ambivalence of photography between documentary and art; a type of ambiguity that he brings to the extreme in his works in order to urge us to think about what is real. Hugo’s photographic approach blends different genres, documentary and artistic photography, alongside commercial and still life: all of them engage in a dialogue and influence each other resulting in a unique and personal vision.
Hugo is aware that photography is not a transparent window and tells me that he struggles to think about photographs as metaphors because all that photography can do is to describe the surface of things: the meaning we ascribe to them depends on our cultural and visual baggage and the society in which we live. To Hugo, if a photographer produces an image that does not leave room to other interpretations but is univocal it becomes propaganda while he prefers that his images remain open; “photographs are like children, they grow, go about the world and no longer belong to you”.
Bibliography
Glaviano, A., 2013. Pieter Hugo. [Online]Available at: https://www.vogue.it/en/photography/interviews/2013/12/06/pieter-hugo/?refresh_ce=
[Accessed 28 11 2019].
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