Pieter Hugo
Dayaba Usman with the monkey Clear is included in The Hyena and Other Men, a photographic essay that documents the Gadawan Kura, an itinerant family of traditional healers and entertainers, together with the wild animals they use to promote their herbal (and more often magical) remedies. Many myths surround these performers, as do the spells and incantations which protect them from the harm necessary to their trade. At once exotic and strange, the photographs are intimate portraits of people and captive animals. “What I found fascinating,” Hugo said of the series, “was the hybridisation of the urban and the wild, and the paradoxical relationship that the handlers have with their animals – sometimes doting and affectionate, sometimes brutal and cruel… I look back at the notebooks I had kept while with them. The words dominance, co-dependence and submission kept appearing… The motifs that linger are the fraught relationships we have with ourselves, with animals and with nature.”
b.1976, Johannesburg
“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 – in Africa 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 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, never 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.