Pieter Hugo

Pieter Hugo (born 1976 in Johannesburg) is a South African photographic artist based in Cape Town. Working largely through portraiture, he examines post-apartheid South Africa and the wider African continent through questions of looking, marginalization, whiteness, bodies, labor, consumption, and the memory of violence^*1.

Important bodies of work include The Hyena and Other Men, on animal handlers in Nigeria; Permanent Error, photographed at the Agbogbloshie e-waste site in Ghana; and Kin, which turns toward family, land, race, and historical memory in South Africa^*2*3. These projects keep two pressures visible at once: the danger of consuming other people as spectacle, and the ethical impossibility of simply looking away. Hugo often uses frontal portraiture and hard, clear light, creating images that classify their subjects while also reflecting the viewer’s assumptions and desire back toward the viewer.

Hugo received the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award and the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Bamako African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012^*1. Within this site’s coordinates, he belongs after Ernest Cole as part of a South African photographic line that moves from direct anti-apartheid witness toward a more reflexive contemporary portrait practice, one that asks who is represented, who is looking, and what power remains inside the image.