Pieter Hugo (born 1976) is a South African photographer who primarily works in portraiture. He lives in Cape Town.
Hugo has had four monographs published. He has had solo exhibitions at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2018), Museum für Kuns und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, National Portrait Gallery, London, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow and the South African National Gallery, Cape Town. He has been included in group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands, Tate Modern, London, DeVos Art Museum, Marquette, Michigan, and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Santiago, Chile.
Early life
Hugo was born in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Career
He began his career working in the film industry in Cape Town, before undertaking a two-year residency at Fabrica research centre, Treviso, Italy.
Hugo has had four monographs published: Pieter Hugo: The Hyena and Other Men (2008), Pieter Hugo: Selected Works (2009), This Must Be the Place (2012), and Pieter Hugo: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (2017).
He has produced fashion photography features for Arena Homme Plus, Re-Edition Magazine, Document Journal, System Magazine and AnOther Man. He has also collaborated on publications with Louis Vuitton and Hood By Air.
Hugo has contributed to publications such as The New Yorker, Zeit magazine, Le Monde and The New York Times Magazine. In May 2015 he was invited to guest edit the supplement DeLuxe for the Dutch newspaper NRC.nl.
In 2011 Hugo collaborated with Michael Cleary, co-directing the music video for South African musician Spoek Mathambo's cover version of Joy Division's "She's Lost Control". For the video, Hugo won the Young Director Award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In 2015 he directed the music video for "Dirty", a song by South African musical artists Dookoom.
Work
Hugo's work is governed by a self-taught approach to photography. He is one of a generation of post-Apartheid photographers that seeks to confront photography's history of representing marginalised and disempowered people. His work aims to challenge preconceptions around the representation of groups of people 'other' to the Western European norm.
Hugo's first major work Looking Aside (2006) depicts portraits of people "whose appearance makes us look aside" – the blind, people with albinism, the aged, his family and himself. Each of these portraits has the subject posed in a sterile studio setting, under crisp light against a blank background.
His Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide (2011) was described by the Rwanda Genocide Institute as offering "a forensic view of some of the sites of mass execution and graves that stand as lingering memorials to the many thousands of people slaughtered." Hugo's most recognized work is The Hyena & Other Men (2007), which has received a great deal of attention. His series Messina/Mussina (2007) was made in the town of Musina on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa, after Colors magazine asked Hugo to work on an AIDS story. Nollywood (2009) consists of pictures of the Nigerian film industry. For Permanent Error (2011) Hugo photographed the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. There is a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends (2012) depicts Hugo's family and friends from South Africa in digitally manipulated black and white portraits that aim to explore the contradictions of racial classification based on skin colour. Kin (2014) places even greater emphasis on the photographer's family and community which Hugo describes as "an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being 'colonial driftwood'."