Emeka, motorcyclist and Abdullahi Ahmadu Asaba, Nigeria, from the series “The Hyena & Other Men”, 2005-2007, 2007. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg
Imagine coming of age as a white man in South Africa during Apartheid. How does the truth of your people weigh on you: does it turn you into an accomplice or does it push you into the margins of resistance? It’s a question worthy of consideration outside the frame of SA – it speaks to the nature of existence: do you stand for or against oppression?
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South African photographer Pieter Hugo took to the camera to address his questions and concerns, using the medium as a means to examine, document, and subvert, creating several bodies of work that are deeply layered and resonant, charged with strength, emotion, and defiance.
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Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg/Prestel) beautifully presents Hugo’s most important series made over the past two decades. Here we see how Hugo inherently understood his position as a white man in South Africa and the legacy it entailed, neither shirking from, diminishing, or rationalizing the horrors of his people. Instead he took his inheritance as the opportunity to set the record straight, to stand as an outsider and from this vantage point, use the camera to speak truth to power.
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Of the first series, Looking Aside, made in South African between 2003 and 2006, Hugo writes, “In this early body of work I explicitly took a confrontational stance, an attitude that is rehearsed in a lot of my subsequent work. It is an unflinching series. I wanted the intensity of my own gaze.”
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That gaze was informed by two trajectories: the falsehoods of photojournalism as informed by American ideologies steeped in superficial humanism and the use of photography by the South African government as a means to control apartheid through a system of classification and separation. With these currents flowing through his mind, Hugo pointed his camera straight on, creating a series of portraits that defy romanticism, intended to discomfit and disconcert with their lack of heroicism, beauty, or pretense.
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This direct approach makes use of the camera as a tool of aggression, for it forces us to look, to see, to recognize a picture of humanity that has been whitewashed, distorted, or completely denied. Whether photographing the vestiges of the Rwandan Genocide in 2004 or The Hyena & Other Men in Nigeria in 2005-2007, Hugo’s photographs are challenging and confrontational, yet courageous.
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Hugo’s willingness to upend tradition was transformative. Where The Hyena & Other Men was shocking when it was first released, it has now become embedded into the fabric of fine art photography. And this is where things begin to shift, as Hugo’s work blurs the boundaries between documentary, portraiture, and fine art to create a new kind of environmental portraiture.
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Obechukwu Nwoye, Enugu, Nigeria, from the series “Nollywood”, 2008-2009, 2008. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg
Green Point Common, Cape Town, from the series “Kin”, 2006-2013, 2007. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg
From the Wild Honey Collectors, shot in Ghana in 2005, to Nollywood, made in Nigeria in 2008-2009, we see the emergence of a new aspect to Hugo’s work. “In my development as an artist,” Hugo writes of Nollywood, “this project was the first time I really questioned the veracity of the portrait. I became aware of how one can play with portraiture, this it can be much more than just the superficial depiction of a subject.”
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And so, by the time he was making Kin in South Africa between 2006-2013, and Permanent Error in Ghana in 2009-2010, everything had changed. Hugo’s portraits had entered into a new realm, one that was just as direct but less antagonistic. They were subtle and complex yet at times eerie and apocalyptic. Their humanism was neither sentimental nor idealistic; instead they captured the disturbing fact that reality is deeply unnerving.
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Rooted in truth, we simply look and we observe, but it is how we react — and what we do with that reaction, that speaks of and for our character. Since seeing Hugo’s photographs made for Permanent Error, published by Prestel in 2011, I felt a shift: a purpose and a calling in my writing about photography and art.
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His photographs are made inside a circle of hell. The Agbogbloshie dump, located on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital, Accra, is a wetland turned wasteland, a slum and a workplace populated by thousands of men and boys who refer to this area as Sodom and Gomorrah. This is a slum of the twenty-first century, a place that Western countries would never allow within their borders, a place that could only exist among disenfranchised—in the rice fields of Guiya, China; behind the electronics markets of Lagos, Nigeria; in the back alleys of Karachi, Delhi, and Hanoi. It is the place where pits are dug and fires burn, and in those fires, our Information Age truly leaves its mark.
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The United Nations Environment Program estimates that we now produce 50 million metric tons of e-waste per year, and 6,500 tons will arrive each month at the Port of Tema, where it then finds its way on to Agbogbloshie. The workers in these poisoned pits make their living first by hauling then smashing, gutting, and burning the televisions and computers to recover copper, steel, and aluminum. The only thing green in this equation is the money being made by electronics manufacturers, whose sales are booming—despite the recession—for computer games, printers, electronic toys, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS devices, camcorders, tablet readers, computers, and televisions.
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In 2001, when the book was released, United States, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Japan, and South Korea refuse to honor the Basel Ban Agreement, which was created in 1995 to ban the export of all forms of hazardous wastes for any reason. Of these countries, only the US refused to ratify the original 1989 United Nations treaty known as the Basel Convention, which created a full an on the export of toxic wastes for any reason from developed to developing countries.
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The result of this failure is the creation of places like Agbogbloshie, where the unrelenting waves of the Information Age crash upon the shores like tidal waves. Pieter Hugo’s photographs show us the price of progress, an unquantifiable desecration of the earth and its inhabitants. This kind of inhumanity reaches a level on unconscionable ignorance that Hugo’s photographs brutally address. Baring witness to a new kind of inferno that is in its nascent stage, Hugo’s photographs stand as a testament against our complacent assumptions. “Recycling” is the chipper chatter of marketers leading the masquerade.
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Permanent Error stands in dark warning and reveal the reality of our brutally consumerist lifestyle. We share this responsibility, just as we share this earth. You and me, your friends and family, all of us are the reason Agbogbloshie exists. I’ve never gotten over this and it challenges me to come to terms with not only my work as a writer but as someone complicit in the destruction of the planet.
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Hugo reminds me that reality exists beyond our experience of it, and at the same time it is our responsibility to come to terms with our inheritance. To avoid and ignore, to rationalize, to pretend or play dumb is nothing more than a lie. On the path to solutions, we must first speak the truth, to ask the disturbing questions, and come to terms with our guilt. Too many get caught up in shame and blame, in a disingenuous paradigm that asserts itself to avoid responsibility.
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That we don’t have the answers is rational. How could we when we can barely speak or acknowledge the truth? Hugo reminds us, the first step towards salvation is owning up, baring the burden, and transforming it through the action of redemption and salvation in the name of humanity.
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Thoba Calvin and Tshepo Cameron Sithole- Modisane, Pretoria, from the series “Kin”, 2006- 2013, 2013. © Pieter Hugo / Stevenson gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg
