Photographer Pieter Hugo is resolutely exploring questions of identity and marginality by shooting Africa’s subcultures. Although he once said that photography is dead, Hugo’s photographs have the power to disturb in an image-saturated world.
The 34-year-old South African photographer’s work has already toured the world with exhibitions in France, Australia, UK, Netherlands, USA… and so on. It has picked up a few awards on the way, including the 2008 Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival.
Pieter Hugo’s body of work explores his fascination with the African urban world and those who exist on its margins. This preoccupation is also a reflection of his own existence in a country where skin colour is intrinsically linked to identity.
“I am a white South-African,” he says. “I came of age when South Africa went into transition. And I think that this sense of being part of something while not being part of it has really informed why I look at certain subcultures.”
That’s a question he pursued in Nigeria with the characters portrayed in the project The hyena and other men who live on the periphery of towns and cities, with tamed hyenas, entertaining crowds and selling traditional medicine.
Or even in Nollywood, a collection inspired by the world’s third largest film industry. Here he strives to blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy with portraits illustrating how the abnormal permeates every day life.
If the making of The hyena and other men took over two years, the three short series Hugo is showing at Colette boutique in Paris at the moment happened almost spontaneously.
“I was in Kinshasa, saw the wrestlers and photographed them in one hour. For the Scout Uniform series, I was sitting in a bar in Liberia, the boy scouts walked pass and the next thing, I had a series of them” he says.
What binds the three different subjects together, he adds, is how clothes signify status. One can see that in the uniform worn by the Liberian boy scouts, the costume of the Congolese wrestlers and the eccentric garments and accessories of the South African Orlando pirates supporters. Outside layers which are a statement of who we are. Here again, Pieter Hugo looks deep into the eyes of those who cross his path, shooting the burlesque when it arises.
“I’m African but I’m not really African,” says Pieter Hugo while pondering the question of identity. For many living in sub-Saharan Africa, skin colour defines “Africanness”, a notion projected by some black Africans and absorbed to a certain extent by non-black African communities.
“If you ask people in Africa whether a white person can be African or whether a person of Indian origin can be African, they’ll say no, they can’t,” comments Hugo. “Yet, there are many people of Indian or white origin that has grown up there and whose family has been here for many generations”.
Pieter Hugo argues that to a large extent the perception of Africa rooted in an imaginary notion of a pristine world comes from Europeans “or the so-called developed world”.
“There’s certainly not a pan-African solidarity, if one thinks of tribalism and conflicts,” he says.
He has recently finished a project at the Agbogbloshie market in Ghana’s capital, Accra, and is currently working on a book to be published next year.
“I think I’m done working with Africa for a while,” he says.
His next area of exploration will be the United States of America, a colonised country which resembles his native South Africa in many ways. Both are stimulating places to work and can bring out emotions of internal conflict.
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