Pieter Hugo

Christopher Abani

Stacy Hardy

Zina Saro-Wiwa

Photographer Pieter Hugo's images offer an look into Nigeria's thriving film industry. The Nigerian film industry is the third largest in the world, after those of the United States and India. Nigerian films often deal with the moral dilemmas facing modern Africans and tell stories familiar to African families - of religion, violence, AIDS, and economic hardship. Pieter Hugo documents the intense and incredibly colorful world of Nollywood from an unusual angle. His images are staged representations of Nigerian film sets, featuring local actors who recreate themes and characters from Nollywood films - young men in military fatigues; witch doctors, healers and saints; hunters with their kill; prostitutes in their rooms. The result is a series of surreal tableaux rooted in local symbolic imagery. Accompanying the photographs are texts by Chris Abani, whose short fiction piece captures the chaos of the filmmaking process, and an essay by Zina Saro-Wiwa on Nollywood's explosive growth and what it means to Nigerians. Presented in a simple and restrained format, Hugo's photographs aims to reveal a little-known phenomenon to a wider Audience.

Nollywood

T. J. Demos

Aaron Schuman

This Must Be the Place presents nearly ten years of work by award-winning South African photographer Pieter Hugo. This book includes a selection of over 100 seminal images from before and after The Hyena & Other Men, the series that catapulted him into the spotlight in 2007. Perceptive essays by TJ Demos and Aaron Schuman situate Hugo's extraordinary career within the realm of contemporary photography and the larger historical context of his native continent, Africa. As Schuman writes, `Hugo's images offer an arresting argument for the untrustworthiness of photography, and at the same time reveal the striking vitality that remains at the heart of the medium when a practitioner bravely dares to pose difficult questions'.

This Must be the Place

Adetokunbo Abiola

Many myths surround the "Hyena Men" who haunt the peripheries of Nigeria's cities. Accompanied by hyenas, rock pythons and baboons, these men earn a living by performing before crowds and selling traditional medicines. Pieter Hugo's extraordinary portraits of their liminal existence reveal an uncanny world of complex, codependent relationships, where familiar distinctions between dominance and submission, wildness and domesticity, tradition and modernity are constantly subverted. Nigerian journalist Adetokunbo Abiola introduces readers to the "Hyena Men," explaining the traditions and mystique behind their practices. Presented in thirty-five full-color plates, these intense portraits reveal why Hugo is one of the most exciting young photographers at work today.

The Hyena & Other Men

Ben Okri

Pieter Hugo has garnered critical acclaim for his series of portraits and landscapes, each of which explore a facet of his native South Africa and neighboring African countries, including the film sets of Nigerias Nollywood; and toxic garbage dumps in Ghana; and sites of mass executions in Rwanda, as well as albinos, the Hyena Men of Nigeria, honey collectors, and garbage scavengers. Kin , a collection of images shot throughout South Africa over the past decade, focuses instead on the photgraphers family, his community, and himself. Writer John Mahoney characterizes it as the artists first major work to focus exclusively on his personal experience in his native South Africa, a place defined by centuries of political, cultural, and racial tensions and contradictions. Hugo describes his series as an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being colonial driftwood. South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded, and problematic place . . . How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent should one try? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? This work attempts to address these questions and reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives.

Many myths surround the Hyena Men who haunt the peripheries of Nigeria's cities. Accompanied by hyenas, rock pythons and baboons, these men earn a living by performing before crowds and selling traditional medicines. Pieter Hugo's extraordinary portraits of their liminal existence reveal an uncanny world of complex, codependent relationships, where familiar distinctions between dominance and submission, wildness and domesticity, tradition and modernity are constantly subverted.

Messina/Musina

The most recent publication from the award-winning photographer Pieter Hugo reveals the devastating consequences of toxic waste on one community in Africa. In his previous well-received volumes of photographs, Hugo offers unflinching yet striking portraits of humans, animals, societies, and landscapes that shock and disturb, but also demand our attention. In Permanent Error, he documents a garbage dump in Ghana that has become the repository for discarded computers from around the world. These haunting images document the true cost of a misguided policy-the shipping of millions of tons of obsolete computers to developing countries. The computers are burned to extract valuable metals, effectively turning the site into a toxic wasteland that contaminates air, soil, and groundwater for miles around. These amazing portraits tell a story of a marginal community overwhelmed by poverty, but where human strength and resilience shine through the inhuman conditions Hugo lays bare.

Pieter Hugo

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