Pieter Hugo
“Mexico has a particular ethos and aesthetic; there is an acceptance that life has no glorious victory, no happy ending,” Pieter Hugo writes of La Cucaracha (2020), the series from which this photograph is taken. “Humour, ritual, a strong sense of community and an embrace of the inevitable make it possible to live with tragic and often unacceptable situations.” He continues: “Alongside the flamboyance and high-pitched register of this series, there is the ordinariness of the everyday. I am drawn to the fabulousness of the banal and the banality of the exotic.” Made over the course of two years and four trips to Mexico, the collected photographs record the outsider’s encounter with the country’s cultural landscape, blending photojournalism and magical realism in saturated, sharp-edged compositions. Garish and gritty, Hugo’s series asks after ritual and rites of passage, sex and spirituality, the ambient threat of cartel violence and the performed violence of Catholic pageantry. The body is a recurring feature in many of these photographs – costumed, undressed, at labour, at rest – complemented by interior studies and still lifes, among them this incandescent cactus, rendered literally luminescent in this exhibition as a large-scale lightbox. In image and title, Burning bush, Oaxaca de Juárez invokes the story of Moses in the Old Testament, the roadside fire refigured as a divine sign:
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. […] God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. […] Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.
b.1976, Johannesburg; works in Cape Town
“My eye is drawn,” the photographer Pieter Hugo writes, “to the peripheral, particularly in Africa, and I negotiate contexts where the cultural nuances of our time are amplified.” Mediating the representation of marginalised people – on the continent and elsewhere – Hugo is attuned to the voyeurism of photography and its claims to realism. “I am of a generation that approaches photography,” he says, “with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything.” In all his photographs, his subjects participate in making their image. Hugo more often works with a large-format camera, which requires a setting up of the image, a conversation with his subject, necessitates time spent. As such, his photographs are never covert, seldom spontaneous, but made with the deliberate care the medium demands. Hugo’s photographic essays have included such various subjects as Liberian boy scouts, people with albinism, Nollywood actors, and Mexican muxe.
