Bloodsucking Freaks
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
I like Pieter Hugo’s new work. This is hard for me to say and probably why it has taken me so long to write about it - having seen it for the first time at the opening of Micheal Stevenson’s impressive MacMuseum. More than disliking Pieter’s work in the past, I have always found it a potent symbol of everything that is problematic about photography, particularly in South Africa (cleverly hidden by Hugo’s hot-young-contemporary persona).
Hugo’s work exoticises and romanticises black African identity through his clever constructions, not to mention exploiting albinos, the blind and other Others. Speaking about his 2006 Ghana Honey Collectors series, not incidentally made in the year he won World Press Photo, he admitted (albeit only to the few old ladies at the FONG walkabout) that the photographs were taken out of honey season - becoming 'like a fashion show'. I always had a problem with this:
“Look, black people dressed funny in a jungle pretending to collect honey”. Not unlike: “look, black people with hyenas, look black people in Orlando Pirates garb, look black Wolf Women (no really), look black vampires sucking each other’s blood.” And this is where his new work becomes interesting, in particular his actual photograph of black people sucking each other’s blood.
Hugo’s new Nollywood (referring to the Nigerian low budget film industry) series shows Nigerian performers enacting scenes presumably indicative of their films. In costume and character, there is a schlock horror in these images that is both unsettling and funny, the latter particularly when considering Hugo’s Oeuvre. Is this a commentary on the construction inherent in documentary photography in Africa? Is this a comment on the romanticising and exoticising of the African body via photography? Is this a parody of Hugo’s previous works?
Probably not. Probably it’s just another fascinating African quirk, lovingly delivered to the lounges of the rich and famous through this slick photographer. But maybe, just maybe, Hugo has developed a real sense of humour about his work. Either way, it is great work, and I hope he’s having fun in Rwanda.
posted by Linda Stupart at 3:12 PM
6 Comments:
What an impressively considerate way of opening a discussion about this worrying genre, by finding something about it to actually like. I have often wondered whether, in all the verbiage they spread about the art they're selling, people like Michael Stevenson have any consciousness of being the contemporary version of peddlers of severed hands and shrunken heads to a market of prurient voyeurs. I think if his buyers were less wealthy, they'd be crowding open-mouthed around car accidents, loudly protesting their shocked innocence, while their eyes scavenged greedily around for arousing sights of ruptured flesh and debasement.
not anything like a bad as Roger Ballen or Obie Oberholzer
the way Pieter constructs his images is identical to that used by Ballen - they both started in a documentary mode and moved to 'staged' realities once the weird factor (their only point of differentiation) in the documentary work started to fade. Neither of these people are artists, they are just photographers represented by art galleries, and therein lies their Achilles heel.
I find it fascinating that there seems to such a huge market for this stuff. It feels like Africa is a big factory producing content for contemporary freak shows, and the intrepid middle-man can go in and pluck the big pot of gold.
'OEUVRE'? - at 3:12 in the afternoon...
Maybe you don't speak English at 3.12 in the afternoon. Maybe other people do.
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