Pieter Hugo Mexico

PIETER HUGO’S NEW SERIES EXPLORES SEX AND DEATH IN MEXICO

OCTOBER 10, 2019
By Ted Stansfield (Stansfield, 2019)

South African photographer Pieter Hugo discusses his new body of work ‘La Cucaracha’, which is currently on show at Priska Pasquer in Cologne

Pieter Hugo is one of the most prolific outsider photographers working today. Born and still based in South Africa, he has spent his photographic career documenting individuals and communities living on the fringes of society. Producing much of his work on the African continent, he has focused his lens on the film industry in Nigeria (Nollywood, 2009); a rubbish dump in Ghana (Permanent Error, 2011); sites of mass executions in Rwanda (Vestiges of a Genocide, 2011); his own family and friends in South Africa (There’s a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends, 2011, and Kin, 2015); male adult film stars and Gully Queens in Jamaica (PH&HBA, 2016); and, perhaps most famously, hyena handlers also in Nigeria (The hyena & other men, 2007). Hugo has contributed to Another Man too, shooting in Morocco and Ibiza with Another Man’s fashion director Ellie Grace Cumming.

The sex worker, Oaxaca de Juárez, 2018 (Hugo 2018)

This autumn, Hugo presents a new body of work titled La Cucaracha (‘The Cockroach’, which is a traditional Spanish folk song popular in Mexico), which explores ideas of sex and death in Mexico. Shot over a period of four trips, the series features a range of subjects – found through community theatre groups, Instagram and Grindr, among other places – and grapples with some of the contradictions that are present in modern-day Mexican life and culture, such as the gentleness of its people and the violence of its drug cartels. Raw, real, and profoundly beautiful, La Cucaracha was on show at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, and remains on display at Priska Pasquer, Cologne until November 23, 2019. Here, Hugo discusses the series in more detail.

Ted Stansfield: Can you tell us about this series?

Pieter Hugo: A couple of years ago, a curator from Mexico was putting together a big show of South African art in Oaxaca and invited me to come make work in dialogue with the exhibition. The exhibition was called Hacer Noche, which means ‘the crossing night’ and his only brief to me was that the work should be about sex and death. Which was great, because all work essentially deals with sex and death! I spent a month there making work. While I was there something shifted in my process; the way I make work, the way I look. It got its claws into me and I felt I needed to go back and continue the series. I went back four times and that’s where we are at now.

The snake charmer, Hermosillo, 2019 (Hugo 2019)

TS: What struck you about the country?

PH: Well it wasn’t so much about the country in this series. I don’t think the work needs to be read as a narrative – I’d prefer individual images that happen to be set in Mexico. Mexico has got this unique aesthetic and approach to mortality which I find very refreshing – there’s something celebratory in it. There’s also this acceptance that there’s more to life than what meets the eye. In the Trump/narco-state era, I’m curious about the normalisation of violence.

TS: Can you tell me about some of the people that you photographed, obviously it’s a very interesting mix. Do you have any particular favourites?

The lovers, Hermosillo, 2019 (Hugo 2019)

PH: I found a lot of the subjects through community theatre groups, photography schools, people on the sides of highways, friends of friends, Instagram, and Grindr. The pictures that I particularly like are ‘The Snake Charmer’, ‘The Lovers’, ‘The Advocate at Home’, ‘The Wedding Gift’, and ‘Black Friday’. This work really has a dialogue happening with visual history and literary history which has such close ties to magic realism but also with Mexican muralism. There’s a Mexican muralist movement which was a very socialist, almost bordering on a communist, form of art. You would have large-scale historical narratives depicted in one artwork. Which is very close to documentary storytelling traditions?

TS: You’ve said that your work focuses on outsiders. What is that?

PH: I think a lot of that is a continuous search to situate myself and photography enables me to do that.

TS: Do you think Mexico, in terms of what’s going on politically at the moment, counts as an outsider?

PH: Yeah I do, in the Trump era it’s definitely the ‘other’. The border becomes a negotiated space. It is a space lacking clear boundaries – moral and physical. It is a space that is both used by opportunists and by the desperate.

TS: There’s a lot more nudity in this series than other series you’ve done. Obviously your brief was sex and death, but was there any other reason you decided to do this?

PH: I think it’s because I’m approaching my mid-forties and finally feel comfortable in my own skin. So for the first time I feel comfortable making nudes, because of that. At the same time, as an artist you pose yourself riddles that you try and solve. Of course the nude has a long and complicated history in artistry. It’s a challenge to make a nude that does not fall into the male erotic gaze or that cliché. I guess that’s a preoccupation and I wanted to investigate this.

TS: So how would you describe your approach to the nude?

PH: Fabulous and confrontational.

TS: They’re definitely not sexualised though.

PH: I’m not interested in particular in nudes that one might consider fashionable or erotic. I’m interested in people’s bodies and in how the environment shaped it. Whether it’s scars or sun-tan lines. Just that relationship between how we shape our environment and how the environment shapes us. I’m interested in how our history imposes itself physically upon us. That’s something that I find quite compelling and piques my curiosity.

TS: Other images are quite violent – one features a body that’s on fire, another features a severed head. I am assuming that head isn’t real...?

The wedding gift, Juchitán de Zaragoza, 2018 (Hugo 2018)

PH: It’s a prop from a movie set but then at the same time if you google ‘narco murders’ you’ll see a barrage of extremely violent images of decapitated humans and mutilated bodies. This, of course, comes back to Mexico’s relationship with its dead. It’s very hard to reconcile the gentleness of the people you meet in Mexico and with the reality of parts of the country that are ruled or governed by a narco-state. At the same time, I think photographers are attracted to detritus and death like flies to shit. That’s also something I’m thinking about and interested in... 

TS: Have you come to any conclusions about why that is?

PH: I think everyone is attracted to it in some way. Look at what Hollywood puts out there – it’s all simulated sex and violence. When we drive past a terrible car accident we can’t stop ourselves from looking...

Bibliography

Hugo, P., 2018. The sex worker, Oaxaca de Juárez, 2018. [Art].

Hugo, P., 2018. The wedding gift, Juchitán de Zaragoza,. [Art].

Hugo, P., 2019. The lovers, Hermosillo,. [Art].

Hugo, P., 2019. The snake charmer, Hermosillo. [Art].

Stansfield, T., 2019. PIETER HUGO’S NEW SERIES EXPLORES SEX AND DEATH IN MEXICO. [Online]
Available at: https://www.anothermanmag.com/life-culture/10974/pieter-hugo-la-cucaracha-sex-and-death-in-mexico-priska-pasquer
[Accessed 29 11 2019].

Pieter Hugo: Photography and Other Truths

Pieter Hugo: Photography and Other Truths

South Africa's Pieter Hugo on negotiating representations of Africa, the searing controversy surrounding his work, Nick Cave, and his friend the late Tim Hetherington.

By Noah Rabinowitz
May 15, 2012


All photographs © Pieter Hugo
Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York and Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town

South African Pieter Hugo’s striking photographs of contemporary Africa, infamously referenced by Beyoncé Knowles and Nick Cave’s Grinderman music videos, have garnered global recognition. His work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The FOAM Museum of Photography, and The Museum of Modern Art. With even a passing glance at this young artist’s curriculum vitae, his influence on contemporary art and photography is clear.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1976, Hugo is a self-taught documentary photographer. His images are created using a large format camera, a bulky piece of equipment that does not lend itself to the surreptitious photographer. His work hinges on personal interaction and connection with his subjects. “The power of photography is inherently voyeuristic,” he said in an interview with The Independent last year. “But I want that desire to look to be confronted.” And yet, he is “deeply suspicious of the power of photography.”

A question that many photojournalists and photo documentarians struggle to answer is whether a camera can capture truth. For Hugo, his work has brought to him “a type of ecstatic experience where one looks at the pictures and the truth of one experience, even if it’s not the truth of an account.”
In March, The Hague Museum of Photography became the first museum to exhibit a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s work from 2003 through 2011, entitled This Must Be The Place. (The show ends on May 20.)

Publisher Prestel-Munich produced a concurrent book, Pieter Hugo: This Must Be The Place, with essays by T.J. Demos and Aaron Schumann.

Together with many previously unseen photographs, the exhibition includes a curated selection of his six published books. The most well known of which, The Hyena & Other Men (2005-2007), documents a group of performers in Nigeria and Lagos who work with hyenas, baboons, and pythons. Hugo’s Nollywood (2008) a commentary on Africa’s film industry, is described by Michael Stevenson, curator of the Gallery Federica Angelucci, as “overdramatic, deprived of happy endings, tragic. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.” Permanent Error (2011) studies a dump in Ghana where the obsession with gadget iterations—the tech industry’s “planned obsolescence”—is exposed in a narrative of global wastefulness. Although each of these evocative series asks us to reassess the perceptions of our world, Hugo’s Hague collection questions photography itself: its limits as well as its increasingly complex methods of representation.

The nature of Hugo’s subject matter has been criticized as sensational and exploitative of the “exotic other”—a criticism of documentary photography dating back to its inception. “My intentions are in no way malignant,” Hugo says, “yet somehow people pick it up in that way. I’ve travelled through Africa, I know it, but at the same time, I’m not really part of it… I can’t claim to [have] an authentic voice, but I can claim to have an honest one.”

I spoke with Peter over Skype, while he was in his home in Johannesburg and preparing for a trip to London.
—Noah Rabinowitz for Guernica

Guernica: There’s a quote in the text of your new book from John Szarkowski, the important former curator of photography at MoMA, stating that “A beginning photographer hopes to learn to use the medium to describe the truth. The intelligent journeyman has learned that there is not enough film to do that.” On several occasions, you’ve said: “photography is finished.” Can you talk about what you see as the medium’s limitations?
Pieter Hugo: Shoot. I think it’s important that it goes on the record that I made that statement when I was completely drunk.
Guernica: [Laughs] It is an interesting issue for a photographer to confront.
Pieter Hugo: At some stage after practising for a while, you’re going to become aware of your idealistic intentions in the beginning and the shortcomings of your work when it gets published. For example, your intentions and the way they are being read by a wider audience are different. I guess that’s really what it comes down to. At the same time, running parallel to that, photography has always been a struggle for me to take seriously as an art form. In the process of working in any medium, you become aware of its limitations. For me, it was realizing that photography could only describe the surface of things. It’s symbolic. It can’t do much more than that. It’s true, seduction lies with its foot in reality. It still has the pretence of being a quasi-document. It’s something literature figured out years ago, and it’s something photography realized quite recently.

Junior Ofokansi, Chetachi Ofokansi, Mpompo Ofokansi, Enugo, Nigeria, 2008 From the series Nollywood

Guernica: How do you decide what to pursue?
Pieter Hugo: A lot of my inspiration is reactionary to images I see in the media. The Hyena Men was a picture that someone took on a cell phone. Apparently, he was an employee of a mobile phone network in Nigeria and he photographed them from a car window. He posted it on the Internet saying “these are debt collectors from Nigeria.” The Nollywood series was made because while I was doing the hyena work, everywhere in West Africa—every hotel I went to, every bar I went to—people were watching these movies. At the time it really just annoyed me. It later became apparent that it was something quite amazing and worth exploring. Permanent Error started because I had read an article in National Geographic on global recycling and there was a photograph taken on a computer dumpsite. The Rwanda work came from an article I read in The Economist on a plane one day. It’s born from literary or media stimulation and then my reaction to it. It’s born out of something I see.Guernica: Let’s talk about your new book and exhibition, and how they came to be.
Pieter Hugo: I currently have a touring survey show that started in the Hague Fotomuseum—the show is curated by Wim van Sindarin and has work from 2003 onwards. There are over one hundred prints in the show and producing a catalogue for it seemed only natural. Then the catalogue became a book. The experience of putting it together was fantastic. I always have the feeling that I’m sitting around not doing anything with my life. A little Calvinist guilt that I should be more productive, but after producing this catalogue I realized that I can relax a little—I actually have been quite busy.

Vegetable garden at the Portuguese Club in Pretoria, 2011 From the series Kin (Hugo 2011)

Guernica: I’m sure it’s cathartic to put these things together and see themes arise. What kind of threads did you see while editing the work?

Pieter Hugo: This survey has been a good opportunity to sit down and look at what my work has been about—to see the different threads that have emerged, and to get a clearer sense of what my preoccupations have been throughout the last couple of years. After I finished school I went straight into becoming a photographer, I didn’t study. In my early twenties, I became a practising photographer, whether it was commercial work, editorial work, or working as a photojournalist. There really wasn’t space where one would get an education about the theory and history of photography. That was just something you learned along the way. There are a few major themes, of course, like “what is real?” I think that’s a big question my work poses. Secondly, it seems to provoke a lot of debate about the rights of representation.
Guernica: Your photographs seem to pose questions rather than answer them.
Pieter Hugo: I feel like I’ve developed a vocabulary. I feel articulate using that vocabulary, but I’m also getting bored with it. That work can become formulaic. I thought the exhibition and book came at a very good time. I’m fortunate it happened at this stage of my career as an artist. One can begin investigating new avenues and new ways of doing things.
Guernica: There are a lot of symbols or icons, clothing or costumes, in your portraits.
Pieter Hugo: Often that is just privy to make a photograph interesting.

Mohamed Bah, Monrovia, Liberia, 2006. From the series Boy Scouts

Guernica: The portraits of the Liberian boy scouts are quite interesting. Can you talk about these images?
Pieter Hugo: That’s a good example. That was really serendipitous because I was on assignment in Liberia to photograph Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—the first female African president—for an American magazine. I finished the shoot and decided to stay on in Liberia for a while, so I was having a beer on my hotel porch and these boy scouts walked past. It so happened that one of the boys was the son of the fixer I was working with. He explained to me that most of the boys were ex-combatants during the civil war. I guess if one is aware of what your preoccupations are, if you keep your eyes open, they’ll show themselves. It also made me realize that you don’t need to go to the jungles of the Congo to make interesting photographs. It can be around you. You just have to open your eyes to it.
Guernica: You graduated high school in 1994, the year the first democratic elections took place in South Africa. Can you talk about how that influences your work?
Pieter Hugo: I grew up in a middle to the upper-class house with fairly liberal sentiments, but to me, it was always very obvious that the society I grew up in was not ideal and needed to change. Since I was a kid it was apparent it was going to change. It wasn’t sustainable the way it was going on.
My work is deeply tied to my experience of growing up in South Africa. It’s very hard to separate that—as much as I’d like to think they are completely personal prerogatives, they are still tied up in the topography of the place I grew up in and the constant negotiation of that place. It’s a problematic place. One constantly questions where you fit into it, or don’t fit into it, or should you bother fitting into it. I guess photography, in the beginning, really gave me an excuse to go out and engage with that, which I think is what good photography is about. It comes down to an engagement with the world.
Guernica: How were photographers working before? What was the mission before, and is it different now?
Pieter Hugo: It’s completely different now. Not that long ago the idea of collecting photography in South Africa did not exist.
Guernica: So it was very functional?
Pieter Hugo: Very functional, although there have always been photographers doing work that wasn’t purely functional. There was a cultural boycott. One grew up never seeing fine art photography in museums. The work one saw in museums wasn’t international. If sports teams played in South Africa you were blacklisted around the world, international sports were boycotted during the period I grew up in. So it was really an isolated place, in a weird way. You were acutely aware that you were at the end of world and the rest of the world didn’t like you and didn’t approve of your political paradigm. So, I learned about photography through photojournalism.
Guernica: You can feel this in your work, but there is something distinctly different from your work and that of a news photographer. Why do you think that is?
Pieter Hugo: I don’t really operate within that call and beckon paradigm anymore and that really creates a different vocabulary. I do assignments, but the kinds I do are for The New York Times Magazine, where they really take time to let me explore something properly. It’s a very different type of journalism, like slow journalism, as opposed to the daily mull of a newspaper. It’s no disrespect, but it’s not particularly interesting to me, that world. I’m not suited to work in that world.
Guernica: I recently saw Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls)” video. I can obviously see your photographs referenced, but I also see Ed Kashi‘s work and the visual language of a variety of photographers. Borrowing isn’t anything new, but to see the work taken for a glossy commercial purpose is a bit jarring. An homage? An appropriation?
Pieter Hugo: I honestly don’t give it that much thought. A part of me just thinks an original idea is like original sin. It happened a long time before you were born. I am indebted to so many people. I guess if you acknowledge it in some way or another, it’s OK.

Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007 From the series The Hyena and Other Men

Guernica: As long as you’re not Richard Prince.
Pieter Hugo: Exactly. The Beyoncé thing I kind of laughed about, but when I saw the hyena men in the Nick Cave video I was pissed off, actually, because I would have loved to do that video. I’ve always been a big fan of Nick Cave.
Guernica: Others may disagree, but in the Nollywood work, I see some comedy.
Pieter Hugo: A lot of people have missed that element of it. It was my Tarantino. I wish more people would see that. But you know what is happening, there’s a lot of reaction to that work. There were particularly strong reactions. One of the Nigerian authors who worked with me on Nollywood had threats made against him for collaborating with me on this work. He was called a race traitor. It’s quite scary when academics start dictating to artists that they should be politically correct or follow certain rules of behaviour—which means we have to start making dishonest work, which means it becomes didactic and propaganda in nature. I find that very troublesome, very problematic. It’s taken me a long time to figure out why it affected me so deeply. It really upset me. It was never my intention in any way.

Chommy Choko Eli, Florence Owanta, Kelechi Anwuacha, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008, From the series Nollywood

Guernica: How is the reaction, if you were to show the image to a Nigerian as opposed to a European or American?
Pieter Hugo: It depends. When you want to look at the Nollywood work and read it as an itinerary of the Nigerian film industry, of course, it’s inaccurate. But if you want to read it as, this is a creative person’s interpretation of the phenomena and has drawn inspiration from the aesthetics of the phenomena, and the audience’s reading of the phenomena, then critique the work on its own merits. Say, “they’re boring photographs where everyone seems to be placed in the middle of the frame.” But of course, I’m not an anthropologist. That’s not what my preoccupations are. I found those criticisms debilitating for a really long time. It took me a while to work through that. My experience with the vitriolic criticism that has come from that work made me very conscious of how damaging it can be to engage your work on that level and to try to dictate to people what they should or should not do or how they should or should not approach the subject matter. And of course, on another level it’s completely condescending, assuming custodianship of other people’s culture. There’s something incredibly patronizing in doing that. In Nigeria you are dealing with the third-largest film industry in the world; the majority of the people read newspapers every day. In a way, the critic is more racist and more condescending. The racist word, using racism to critique anyone, unless it’s completely overtly so, is a very dangerous thing to do. It’s not something that should be taken lightly or thrown around without careful consideration.

Pieter and Maryna Vermeulen with Timana Phosiwa, 2006 From the series Messina/Musina (Hugo 2006)

Guernica: Do you think it is your responsibility as a photographer to provide an interpretation of what you see?
Pieter Hugo: As an artist, it’s not my responsibility to provide a responsible rendition of how the rest of the world should perceive or not perceive Africa. Firstly, I’m not really concerned with Africa, I just happen to work here and it’s become an extension of my topography and the world that I inhabit. Continually ghettoizing it in that way is also very dangerous, or thinking of things as purely Africa, all you are doing is perpetuating this notion of otherness in some way.
Guernica: How is the approach of a photographer from Europe or America different? How do you see someone like Tim Hetherington‘s work?
Pieter Hugo: In many ways, I think Tim Hetherington was a much more dedicated photographer than I am to his themes. He lived in Liberia for years. I definitely wouldn’t have stuck it out there for that long. Tim had an interesting hybrid of preoccupations and influences that comes through in his work. He was quite unique in his own way. He wasn’t scared of experimenting and definitely wasn’t scared of taking the time to do so.
Guernica: You knew him well?
Pieter Hugo: He was a friend of mine. The day I photographed the boy scouts I went to his house. Tim was so happy moving to New York. He found it incredibly liberating. I think he was just one of those people who was an outsider, even in England. He found it frustrating that he went to very posh private schools, but his family had made money just recently. He always found himself to never quite fit in. That’s why he found America so liberating. You can move somewhere and reinvent yourself. We had a good dialogue around that issue: the experience of being an outsider. This is part of the process, of why I often need to go away to make work. It’s not so much that the theme is exotic. Rather, it awards me the isolation of not being distracted and allows me to get on with what I really want to look at.

Bibliography

Hugo, P., 2006. Mohamed Bah, Monrovia, Liberia,. [Art] (From Boy's Scouts).
 
Hugo, P., 2006. Pieter and Maryna Vermeulen with Timana Phosiwa. [Art] (From the series Messina/Musina ).
     
Hugo, P., 2007. Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria,. [Art] (From the series The Hyena and Other Men ).
 
Hugo, P., 2008. Chommy Choko Eli, Florence Owanta, Kelechi Anwuacha, Enugu, Nigeria,. [Art] (From Nollywood).
 
Hugo, P., 2008. Junior Ofokansi, Chetachi Ofokansi, Mpompo Ofokansi, Enugo, Nigeria,. [Art] (From NollyWood).
 
Hugo, P., 2011. Vegetable garden at the Portuguese Club in Pretoria. [Art] (From Kin).
 
Rabinowitz, N., 2012. Pieter Hugo: Photography and Other Truths. [Online]
Available at: https://www.guernicamag.com/photography-and-other-truths/
[Accessed 29 11 2019].

Pieter Hugo, 1994, Newyorker

Pieter Hugo’s “1994”: Children and the Ghosts of National Trauma

By Philip Gefter,  (Gefter, 2017)
February 24, 2017

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“Portrait #1, Rwanda,” 2014. (Hugo, 2014)

The white South African photographer Pieter Hugo has spent a decade and a half photographing Africa’s most marginalized communities: the elderly and the blind, people with aids, albinos who are considered outcasts because of the colorlessness of their skin. In his famous 2007 series, “The Hyena and Other Men,” he photographed Nigerian men with hyenas they had captured and trained to entertain people on the street. He has photographed Ghanaian laborers who cover themselves in banana leaves and garbage bags to collect honey from beehives in the jungle, diamond miners in an isolated town along the Zimbabwe border, and teen-age workers at an oversized dumpsite for obsolete electronics on the outskirts of Accra. Together, Hugo’s series compose a pointed examination of indigenous modes of survival on the African continent in the twenty-first century.

Hugo’s catalogue of portraits, nearly twenty series in all, could fall under the rubric “concerned photography,” the term Cornell Capa coined to describe photojournalism with a social conscience. Yet, equally, his choices of subject divulge a fascination with novelty, oddities, and aesthetic extremes. His approach has, at times, led critics to call Hugo exploitative, an accusation that he rejects. “There’s an element of condescension in it, the notion that the people I photograph are somehow not capable of making their minds up about being photographed,” he told the Guardian in 2008, noting that his critics have consistently been white liberal Europeans.

The title of Hugo’s latest series, “1994,” which is currently on view at Yossi Milo Gallery, refers to the year of the Rwandan genocide, when members of the Hutu majority killed nearly a million Tutsi in a span of a hundred days; it was the same year that apartheid ended in South Africa. South African children born after the end of apartheid were called the Born Frees; in Rwanda, children conceived through rape during the genocide were known as les enfants mauvais souvenirs—the children of bad memories. For this series, shot in the past few years, Hugo made portraits of children of a new generation in villages around Rwanda and South Africa, posing each one in a bucolic setting, where the purity of nature and the innocence of youth evoke a kind of children’s idyll. While the children represent hope and equality, in contrast to the weighted history of atrocities and racial oppression, their gazes are steady and sober, as if they have not entirely escaped their nations’ pasts.

“1994” is by far the most stylized body of work in Hugo’s œuvre. The formal precision in these pictures can be eye-popping, and the compositional symmetry and the positioning of the figures in arcadian settings evoke Mannerist, and, at other times, Pre-Raphaelite qualities. Many of the children in these portraits wear oversized adult clothing that Hugo provided—an elegant silk wedding gown, a Laura Ashley-style country frock, a glamorous sequined cocktail dress. He collaborated with the children on their poses, which are, by turns, naïvely glamorous and innocent. A young girl in a lovely pink dress sits in the clear water of a creek, her legs extended amid the floating fabric under the transparent surface. Her expression borders on the seductive, as if she might be trying out an adult idea. Hugo posed her in this brook with a memory of his own in mind: seeing pictures of hundreds of bloody bodies thrown on this very spot during the Rwandan genocide. No trace of that now.

“I have a deep suspicion of photography, to the point where I do sometimes think it cannot accurately portray anything, really,” Hugo told the Guardian some years ago. “I particularly distrust portrait photography. I mean, do you honestly think a portrait can tell you anything about the subject? And, even if it did, would you trust what it had to say?” Perhaps it’s self-protection that drives him to question the nature of his medium. Or perhaps he balances doubts about his enterprise with an inexorable drive to prove himself wrong. In “1994,” his portraits may not reveal so much about who each child is, but they accomplish something else: a metaphorical evocation of time’s slow erasure of the past.

Bibliography

Gefter, P., 2017. Pieter Hugo’s “1994”: Children and the Ghosts of National Trauma. [Online]
Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-children-of-bad-memories
[Accessed 6 12 2019].

Hugo, P., 2014. Portrait 1. [Art] (From, Rwanda).

Rwanda 1994

Rwanda 1994

Artist Statement

I happened to start the work in Rwanda but I’ve been thinking about the year 1994 in relation to both countries over a period of 10 or 20 years. I noticed how the kids, ­particularly in South Africa, don’t carry the same historical baggage as their parents. I find their engagement with the world to be very refreshing in that they are not burdened by the past, but at the same time, you witness them growing up with these liberation narratives that are in some ways fabrications. It’s like you know something they don’t know about the potential failure or shortcomings of these narratives…

Most of the images were taken in villages around Rwanda and South Africa. There’s a thin line between nature being seen as idyllic and as a place where terrible things happen – permeated by genocide, a constantly contested space. Seen as a metaphor, it’s as if the further you leave the city and its systems of control, the more primal things become. At times the children appear conservative, existing in an orderly world; at other times there’s something feral about them, as in Lord of the Flies, a place devoid of rules. This is most noticeable in the Rwanda images where clothes donated from Europe, with particular cultural significations, are transposed into a completely different context.

Being a parent myself has shifted my way of looking at kids dramatically, so there is the challenge of photographing children unsentimentally. The act of photographing a child is so different – and in many ways more difficult – to make a portrait of an adult. The normal power dynamics between photographer and subject are subtly shifted. I searched for children who seemed already to have fully formed personalities. There is an honesty and a forthrightness which cannot otherwise be evoked. (Hugo, 2019)

Annotations

The work is from the series Rwanda 1994 where Pieter Hugo went around documenting young children who were not alive when the genocide took place and shows the impact on young children.

What is denoted?

The series depicts young children posing in part of Africa. The series stands out to the public about what has happened.

What is Connoted?

The connotations of the work that has been shown highlight the problems that the work has come together of the work that of problems that happened when Pieter Hugo photographed. The feeling is positive as they are not carrying the problems that have affected the parents which is positive from the way he has photographed with them being able to show the story from what has happened. The work shows the meaning of upset when you begin to understand what has happened in the genocide. They are all posed in the way that they wanted to as the photos all link to them

Who is the intended audience?

This project was aimed to highlight the problems that their parents faced in the genocide. It is done to highlight how the families have been caught up in the area. It is intended to bring more people to come together to understand what has happened in the country. How are you affected as a viewer?

How are you affected as a viewer? 

I am affected by looking at this work this stands out because of the way he has come around to photograph the work shown on the project, about how the children are not impacted by the genocide. I am affected by the work because of how the work has been updated to understand what is going on. It would be more powerful if I am not seeing this in large quantity at a gallery.

What makes this work significant to you (and or your project)?

The work is significant to the project because of the way he has got the composition in order for this all to come together. I am going to take the theme of the way they have come together in order to show the viewer with underlying information on here.

What are the strengths of the source you are looking at? What are the weaknesses of the work? (How would you do things differently? What do you think can be improved?)

The strengths of this work are that they all highlight what is going with what has gone on because of the way this has been all styled on the images. I do not like that some of the images are not stand out to me on the owners because they have not information when you look them up online to get more understanding with what is going on. I am planning on taking on the style that Pieter Hugo has worked on to make the work stand out to the viewers.

What ideas (or visual styles) will you take forward to think about in your work?

I am planning on taking the way that he has positioned the subject in the middle of the shots, I am planning on taking the message and working with the message.

What context have you seen the work in?

I have only seen this work on his website and online, this only allows me to see it from a digital preservative and is harder to get the magnetite of the power in the main photographers that he has worked.

Bibliography

Gefter, P., 2017. Pieter Hugo’s “1994”: Children and the Ghosts of National Trauma. [Online]
Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-children-of-bad-memories
[Accessed 6 12 2019].