On the face of it: South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s pictures Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 2015 (Pieter Hugo)
Early on Tuesday morning, Pieter Hugo’s images made him feel emotional.
It was two days after he had finished installing his solo show and went back to the gallery for the first time. “It felt very, I don’t know, I feel quite vulnerable showing some of this work,” he tells me a few hours later via Zoom.
We are chatting about his magisterial exhibition of more than 100 works, taken over 23 years, which opens on Saturday at the Stevenson gallery in Cape Town.
“And I think it’s because it pushes that button of mortality and life for the passing of time, which photography has a relationship with.”
In the new show Hugo, who became globally famous — for some critics, infamous — with the powerful, engrossing pictures he took between 2005 and 2007 of Nigerian animal handlers and itinerant minstrels with their hyenas, baboons and rock pythons, has shifted his focus to birth, death and the rites between.
Like The Hyena and Other Men, his previous series functioned as visual essays. For example from the stark studio portraits of South Africans with albinism Looking Aside (2003 to 2006) to Rwanda: Vestiges of a Genocide (2011), also Permanent Error (2010), about people in an impoverished settlement in Ghana, which is the second-largest e-waste processing area in West Africa, and then photographs of Nigerian actors in make-up in Nollywood (2009).
Titled What the Light Falls On, the new exhibition is a free-ranging meditation on life itself. It is a response to photographic pioneer Helmar Lerski’s assertion that “in every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on”.
I ask Hugo if it can also be read metaphorically, as in light versus darkness.
“Absolutely. It’s not just literal.”
Hugo is in his new studio in Woodstock near Cape Town harbour, and I am in Joburg. He is giving me a virtual artist walkabout through the exhibition from his laptop, flicking through the works on Zoom, while explaining this sprawling project, his most ambitious to date: portraiture, landscape and still life.
“This is one of the pictures that the series starts with, which is a portrait of my daughter being born.”
Flick.
“Then there’s the certain rhythm that occurs through it of nudes, landscapes, often of … This is in Israel, overlooking the Dead Sea — the sea is quite a recurring motif and also rocks. I’ve been photographing rocks for a long time. And the idea started when I went to Israel once with a friend of mine who is from there originally.
“I just had this feeling when I was there — all of this fighting over a pile of stones, people projecting the shit onto [it]. And then the first picture I took was on the side of the road where these stones had been excavated to build a highway towards the Dead Sea and it had … graffiti over. And it felt to me like it had the same kind of religious significance as the Wailing Wall.
“It’s just, at the end of the day, a pile of stones. But you know those piles of stones of Palestinian villages that have been destroyed built new roads for Israeli settlements.”
Flick.
“Here you have someone outside of Washington Station. Landscapes in Israel again.
“Details of this lady collecting firewood in the Karoo.”
Next the wall of a mechanic’s shop in Italy with a crucifix juxtaposed with the centrefold just below it.
“There’s quite a lot of these interiors where you have this arrangement of objects that kind of depict a person or family’s personality or ambitions, I suppose. I suppose, in some ways, it’s why I think of it as symphonic … It’s very ambitious in its scale. I mean, it’s trying to tell something from birth to death.”
Flick to a pic of a blond boy staring into the camera. Is that your child?
“That’s my son, Jakob, yes. He is now 11.”
Next another pic of his daughter, Sofia, who is now a young teenager.
“Her with her cellphone … We live in an era where everything exists to be photographed. Susan Sontag said that years ago already.”
Hugo gives a wry chuckle. “And even more so now where it’s almost, like, if it wasn’t recorded by someone, did it really even happen?”
Hugo is turning 48 next week. In the exhibition notes he says in middle age “one is getting softer both physically and emotionally”.
How does that manifest itself in your work?
“I think there’s a subtlety in this work that maybe wasn’t in other projects of mine,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a happy ending, right, like for something to begin, something’s got to end and for something to end there’s a loss.”
I ask if he has become more aware of his own mortality.
“Very much so. Jeez. Suddenly, suddenly … I think it’s a combination of things, you know, I think you just don’t, I don’t bounce back from a hangover anymore.” He laughs. “Or if you fall off your mountain bike.
“I think that, having kids, and then suddenly like, okay … You better get your shit together because you have to leave something behind for them.
“There’s a finite point on everything. And that definitely … the passing of a parent and the birth of a child definitely puts a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and a full stop at the end.
“My particular experience of that and my way of reading that … the kind of tragic beauty of getting older. There’s this possibility for Eden, but at the same time, there’s always a snake in the grass …”
More showing and telling.
“There’s quite a lot of these kinds of still lifes as well. And they feel to me quite like Dutch, that Vermeer kind of Dutch.”
He clicks again.
“This is a good juxtaposition — this is Table Mountain Road. And here we have a mealie farm in Zimbabwe.”
These days, most of Hugo’s work is global. As with his famous African works, he would piggyback his own projects on it.
“Now I am doing a lot more fashion-based work. I do a lot of work for luxury brands, which is an unfortunate reality.
“Either I have to do that or I have to get a teaching job. And there’s no teaching jobs for me in South Africa at the moment.
“I don’t want to move abroad. This is where I want to stay.”
It also helps him to support his “art habit”, as he puts it.
“And here’s an example in Jamaica. I managed to do a personal project while I was there and piggyback on a fashion editorial for clothes brand Paul Smith [in a rasta village].”
Flick. A Syrian refugee in former East Germany. Flick. The botanical gardens in Napoli. Flick.
“The guy I see every day I walk my dogs in the park.”
Next.
“I love this picture … it just feels so like an American Gothic. Ocean View, South African Gothic. I love it.
“So, there’s a democracy in the images as well, you know …
“That’s my wife. This is an old-age home in Goodwood.”
He pauses on a black-and-white photograph of an elderly man with a scar down the middle of his chest.
“So, my father started getting sick … that’s of his first operation.”
I am sensing that we are getting to the full stop of the exhibition that Hugo mentioned earlier, as he is spooling faster through the photographs.
He doesn’t say anything for quite a while after the next photograph — of a man, eyes shut, in a hospital bed with a hand on his forehead belonging to a person out of shot — appears on the screen.
It is of Hugo’s dad on his deathbed.
Sofia Hugo 2010 Kingsbury Hospital, Cape Town, 2010.
Up close and personal: Pieter Hugo’s photographs of his father on his deathbed and the birth of his daughter serve as bookends to his exhibition What the Light Falls On showing at the Stevenson gallery in Cape Town. Photos: Pieter Hugo
“He died … very soon … after that … was taken.” I wonder if the wi-fi reception is breaking up, but Hugo’s voice comes back, gently. “That’s my mom’s hand on his head.”
He took that final portrait of his father nearly three years ago in the Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital in Cape Town.
“Suddenly, when I added that picture in the mix. I was like, ‘Oh, I should look at this from birth to death.’
“When this picture happened and it was, like, it’s about life and death. It’s about … yeah, the full spectrum, the full gamut of the in-between.”
The exhibition will evolve into a book project, when it will be sequenced roughly chronologically.
“Through this medium, at the moment, is it even possible anymore? I’m not so sure what. But that’s something comforting in trying to.”
What was your relationship with your dad like?
“It was complicated. It was complicated. I guess we had very good connections on certain things and really didn’t see eye to eye about some other things.”
Hugo trails off and I ask: “What did your dad think of your work?”
“He got it, you know, he was always very willing to be photographed … he’s the person who actually bought me a camera when I was a teenager, my first camera, he got me into photography.”
I can hear the smile returning to his voice.
“Ironically, the camera is actually lying on my desk here. I’m going to give it to a friend of mine’s son who’s interested in photography.”
He mentions that his mother, Lize, who is an artist, gave him his artistic education and sensibility.
Hugo was born in Joburg in 1976 but grew up in Cape Town. He started work in the film industry but photography was always close to his heart.
“I think it comes back to the experience I had as a teenager when I got a camera for the first time.
“Maybe I wasn’t as articulate about it at that time. But it enabled me to step into the world and engage with it. It gave me an excuse to look.
“And I think growing up in a space where everything was mediated, it gave me a way of looking for myself.”
‘Pieter Hugo’s photographs are problematic,” was the attention-grabbing opening line of a review in 2012 of his retrospective This Must Be the Place in the UK Observer by the newspaper’s critic Sean O’Hagan. The criticism focused on the photographs of the hyena men, Nollywood and the technology dump in Ghana.
I ask the artist if he has any regrets about photographs he has taken.
“Hmm. I think it was Nietzsche who said something like, ‘To have regrets about a decision, a bad decision, only compounds the stupidity of doing it in the first place.’ Something like that …
“So, I try not to dwell on that but, yeah, I mean, I would have done some things differently for sure. Absolutely. But it’s out there in the world now, so I can’t change that.”
I ask if he were to do something like the hyena men now, whether he would do it differently.
“Well, ironically, I actually photographed those guys again recently.”
Hugo went to Nigeria for a project with the rapper Travis Scott.
“And these guys were in a music video of his, so I actually got to see them again and I got to photograph them again.
“It was, it was super interesting. They kept on taking selfies with me,” he says with a laugh. “They got a lot out of their experience, financially, indirectly, in the long run.”
How were the new pics?
“I’m not the same person that made those pictures at that time. So, the pictures are fine but it’s just not … It doesn’t have the same energy.”
I push him further on the criticism. Do you accept or understand the controversy your work has caused?
“Absolutely. I’ve devoted my life, you know — more than 25 years of my life — to this practice. I take it very seriously.
“And I have detractors, and I think I listen to my detractors, and I’ve learned things from detractors and critics. I’ve learned a lot from critical reviews, where it came from engaging with the world and not a political or personal agenda.
“And it has informed my work. I think there’s a lot of validity in some of the criticisms that I’ve faced over the years. And I think I, as a practitioner, have grown.
“I don’t have time for cancel culture because what it essentially does is it negates one of the most amazing human qualities, which is the quality of redemption we have within us.
“So, I think I see that I’m on a journey as an artist and I’m evolving.
“I’m sure some people that take offence to my work are also on a journey and might look at it differently at some stage. Hopefully they do.”
His work is indisputably political, even if not expressly so. The powerful 2010 photographic essay Permanent Error, about the e-waste processing area in Ghana, looks like an eloquent Marxist critique of First World consumption and waste (my interpretation).
“Being in an environment like this, where geopolitical imbalances are being exploited to effectively dump waste on poor countries, it is hard not to take a political position,” Hugo wrote about the essay at the time.
“And so I have let my photographs be used by advocacy groups.”
Hugo describes himself as politically “liberal”.
“But, beyond that, I find the Gini coefficient that exists, particularly in this country, but globally as well, really disturbing,” he says.
“There’s more than enough for everyone. It doesn’t mean one has to do away with capitalist incentives.
“But I definitely think everyone should have access to healthcare. The same law should apply to everyone.”
In his explanatory notes with his essay Kin (2006—2013) Hugo wrote: “South Africa is a very violent society; the scars of colonialism and apartheid still run deep.”
I ask him how he steers through such a scarred society.
“Yeah, I mean that’s a really tricky one and I’ve thought about this a lot.
“What is one’s obligation to history? Where does it begin? Where does it end? You know, those that are fortunate towards those that are less fortunate. I can’t give a clear answer. I think it’s such a personal question.
“But my practice is international and I could live anywhere in the world really if I wanted to. I think it’s important to be here because I’m part of this place.
“I’m part of its history. I’m part of its problems. I’m part of its solutions. And that’s my decision.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily the decision for everyone.
“But I feel an obligation to the past, and address it in some other way, and I’ll do it my own way.
“You have to be conscious of it. Everyone has to be conscious of it.”
I notice the portrait of Hugo’s father is still on the screen and I think of that camera he gave his son that will go this weekend as a gift to a budding young photographer.
His question will also be what the light falls on.
What the Light Falls On is on from 26 October to 30 November at the Stevenson gallery in Cape Town.
Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara,
Nigeria, 2005. (Pieter Hugo)