Pieter Hugo: The South African Master Of Framing

Pieter Hugo is a South African photographer that is really pushing the limits of street photography. With his uncanny subjects he really transports you to a dystopian parallel universe that takes us beyond the beaten bath of street imagery. He exposes us to some very strong and gritty iconography that is complimented by his powerful framing.

Hugo’s work is governed by an autodidactic approach to photography and a deep scepticism of the role of the photographic medium. 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 man, woman and child poses 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’.”

In the Spring of 2014, Hugo was commissioned by Creative Court to work in Rwanda for its "Rwanda 20 Years: Portraits of Forgiveness" project.The project was displayed in The Hague in the Atrium of The Hague City Hall for the 20th commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A selection of the photos have also been displayed in New York at the exhibition Post-Conflict which was curated by Bradley McCallum, artist in residence for the Coalition for the International Criminal Court.The project served as the impetus for the photographic series 1994 (2017) which explores the post-revolutionary era in both South Africa and Rwanda through a series of portraits of children from both countries.