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Pieter Hugo has made a career out of photographing outsiders. Often working in series, he has focussed his lens on albino people, blind people, and, perhaps most famously, the hyena men of Nigeria and their tamed-but-chained wild-animal companions. Hugo brings the periphery to the centre with his lens and editing, but without the exoticism or romanticism that often accompanies representations of people on the edge of society. Messina/Musina, the body of work that Hugo produced as Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year 2007, continued this narrative arc, chronicling the many realities that exist on the physical and cultural margins of South Africa.
In this respect, he is similar to Roger Ballen, who has gained both fame and notoriety for his images of small town South Africa. But while Ballen’s haunting images emphasise the outsiderness of his subjects, often taking them to the edge of surrealism, Hugo gives his subjects a humanity that is both sympathetic and devoid of sentiment.
Messina, now renamed Musina to correct the colonial corruption of its original name, is one of the Northern-most places in South Africa. It is on the edge of the Zimbabwean border and is both literally and figuratively a place that is peripheral to what is considered to be broader reality. With its hunting farms and diamond mines and North/South Access, Musina attracts a disparate collection of people drawn to the town by the opportunities it offers in a barren landscape.
Hugo documents this landscape in disturbing detail, chronicling an uncomfortable relationship with the physical environment that is at once beautiful and uncaring, God’s country in a time when God seems to be dead. And there is something strangely religious about Hugo’s work, something which becomes particularly resonant when looking at his portraits of the individuals and families who occupy this landscape. Transfusing studio light into people’s living rooms, the result is an unnerving and knowing blend of family snapshots and kitsch but immaculate studio photography. Collectively, the images ask questions about race, nationality, difference and sameness, without even beginning to suggest that the questions are answerable.
The photographs in Messina/Mussina are, like much of Hugo’s work, provocative. But, more than that, they are beautiful, despite the fact that they exist very far from the conventions of beauty. They are by no means pretty – Hugo himself says, and echoes the sentiments of thousands before him, that art should not be pretty. But even when his images are of litter or road kill or the detritus of civilisation encroaching on immaculately unspoilt landscapes, a strange, slightly disturbing – and perhaps slightly unsatisfying – beauty remains.
Hugo believes in honesty, and he is honest enough – or disingenuous enough if you take a different tack – to suggest that his own subjectivity is also paramount. So, he believes in honesty, rather than truth perhaps. But his images are not ideologically or politically intentioned. Instead, in their strange fusion of documentary, fine art and the large format most familiar to us from the realm of advertising, they create another world very much like this one.
Pieter Hugo has made a career out of photographing outsiders. Often working in series, he has focussed his lens on albino people, blind people, and, perhaps most famously, the hyena men of Nigeria and their tamed-but-chained wild-animal companions. Hugo brings the periphery to the centre with his lens and editing, but without the exoticism or romanticism that often accompanies representations of people on the edge of society. Messina/Musina, the body of work that Hugo produced as Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year 2007, continued this narrative arc, chronicling the many realities that exist on the physical and cultural margins of South Africa.
In this respect, he is similar to Roger Ballen, who has gained both fame and notoriety for his images of small town South Africa. But while Ballen’s haunting images emphasise the outsiderness of his subjects, often taking them to the edge of surrealism, Hugo gives his subjects a humanity that is both sympathetic and devoid of sentiment.
Messina, now renamed Musina to correct the colonial corruption of its original name, is one of the Northern-most places in South Africa. It is on the edge of the Zimbabwean border and is both literally and figuratively a place that is peripheral to what is considered to be broader reality. With its hunting farms and diamond mines and North/South Access, Musina attracts a disparate collection of people drawn to the town by the opportunities it offers in a barren landscape.
Hugo documents this landscape in disturbing detail, chronicling an uncomfortable relationship with the physical environment that is at once beautiful and uncaring, God’s country in a time when God seems to be dead. And there is something strangely religious about Hugo’s work, something which becomes particularly resonant when looking at his portraits of the individuals and families who occupy this landscape. Transfusing studio light into people’s living rooms, the result is an unnerving and knowing blend of family snapshots and kitsch but immaculate studio photography. Collectively, the images ask questions about race, nationality, difference and sameness, without even beginning to suggest that the questions are answerable.
The photographs in Messina/Mussina are, like much of Hugo’s work, provocative. But, more than that, they are beautiful, despite the fact that they exist very far from the conventions of beauty. They are by no means pretty – Hugo himself says, and echoes the sentiments of thousands before him, that art should not be pretty. But even when his images are of litter or road kill or the detritus of civilisation encroaching on immaculately unspoilt landscapes, a strange, slightly disturbing – and perhaps slightly unsatisfying – beauty remains.
Hugo believes in honesty, and he is honest enough – or disingenuous enough if you take a different tack – to suggest that his own subjectivity is also paramount. So, he believes in honesty, rather than truth perhaps. But his images are not ideologically or politically intentioned. Instead, in their strange fusion of documentary, fine art and the large format most familiar to us from the realm of advertising, they create another world very much like this one.
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Joanna Lehan in her conversation with Hugo in the catalogue for Messina/Musina, labours the point that Hugo’s images are laden with irony, or taken from an ironic distance. To which Hugo replies fairly emphatically that these are not ironic images. I ask him why he thinks that so many people presume an ironic approach to work that is in fact remarkable for its lack of distance.
Pieter Hugo: I think that that kind of criticism often comes from South African audiences. I’ve showed the work subsequently in galleries in Italy and in the US – the book is selling very well. And the response people have outside of South Africa is very different to the response South Africans have. I think we often bring quite a big political chip on our shoulders to issues of representation – and understandably so. It’s a kind of national preoccupation, and we often throw the baby out with the bath water, where, if it doesn’t fit a politically correct paradigm, it doesn’t have any validity anymore.
Peter Machen: I would think that people outside of this country are obviously less sensitive to these issues.
PH: I don't think it’s necessarily an issue of being less sensitive. It depends from what kind of vantage point you’re engaging with the work. I suppose it’s often kind of too close to home for South Africans. But to me, the thing the work really deals with is the state of transience. Something that is interesting is that after I did the catalogue and published the book, I’ve been trying to send copies to people in the photographs. And most of them have moved on – they’re not there anymore. And what was interesting to me was that I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what the place was about.
PM: This transitory nature of Musina is reflective not only of such obviously transitory places but also of a South African reality in which many people are constantly in transition, as they follow opportunities, or escape violence, and as they move through the hierarchies of class.
I’d like to talk about the image of the two beggars from Zimbabwe, the blind man and his caretaker. Out of all the photographs, he was the only one who seemed to have any objection to being photographed written on his face.
PH: Oh no!
PM: I actually didn't notice it. Someone pointed it out to me. And I think you could read it as a kind of racial thing, but I think it’s more about his refugee/illegal status.
PH: I think that there might be an issue in it. I think they might have been self-conscious about being photographed. I met them in the mainstreet of Messina, and we went for a walk to one of the side streets to take the photographs. They were actually legally in the country. And you know it’s not a snap that was taken - it’s a large-format photograph. The process of taking the photograph – to get that shot– took twenty minutes, half an hour. If you didn’t want to be photographed you’d have left.
PM: Yeah, sure. But we’re so used to this kind of political correctness in terms of representations and consent. I’d like to open up the fact that you can perhaps take photographs of people who aren’t one hundred percent happy with their photograph being taken. I’d like to explore that possibility. I don’t know how you feel about that…
PH: Look, a portrait is initially a collaboration between two people. But at the end of the day, I still have the power, and the power is in the edit of the pictures. Which one I choose to use really relays what my preferences are. But it starts out as a collaborative process.
How does one feel about using photographs where people are not completely happy with the end result? Well, I’m not going to photograph people that cannot consent to being photographed. And I think that we live in a country that is completely media savvy. People are aware of the power of images, maybe not academically, but they are aware of what imagery can do for you, or not do for you, and of the power behind it. Of course, if someone says they are not happy with the photograph after it's been published, I get slightly affronted by it, because it chips away at my self-esteem and whatnot… (laughs)
But I don’t make a rule about it. I treat it kind of from a situation-to-situation basis. I mean what does one do? There is one person in the book who hasn’t been very happy with their inclusion of their picture, but I distrust his motives for being unhappy about it, so I will keep on using it. But if someone said to me that there’s a photograph of their mother, who died recently, and it upsets them seeing it in the media all the time, I would stop using them, I would stop distributing it in those kinds of avenues
PM: Looking at the work in the gallery, and browsing through the catalogue for the show, I was struck by subtle differences between the black family portraits and those of the white families. The white families seem more composed, and also more fetishised. Do you think there’s any accuracy to that?
PH: Well, it’s not the first time I’ve heard that. Look, when I set about doing family portraits, the families that I photographed are people that I met. And I suppose, unconsciously, one is attracted to certain things and not attracted to other things. I didn’t go out to set up some demographic representation of Messina. For instance, there are tons of traders that have opened up shop. And I didn’t photograph any of them because I didn’t find it interesting or appealing to do so.
PM: Obviously, I see your work in the context of other South African photographers. And I’m thinking specifically of Roger Ballen and Zwelethu Mthethwa, both of whom photograph people outside of their own social class. It’s interesting that people take Roger to task – and you to a lesser extent – and that very few people have challenged Zwelethu’s right to do what he does.
PH: It’s that issue of who is allowed to represent whom. And at the end of the day, one has to be honest. You photograph what appeals to you and what you feel like exploring. I have heard other criticisms of Zwelethu Mthethwa. And with Roger Ballen, once again the criticisms seem to be exclusively South African. I think telling people what they are allowed to and not allowed to photograph is absolutely ridiculous
PM: (laughs) Fully!
PH: It’s like I said in the interview in the catalogue. Are lesbians only allowed to photograph lesbians? It’s absurd.
PM: And for me, it also forgets the fact that we’re all human, and we’re all so fundamentally similar to each other.
PH: Absolutely. I specifically avoid dealing with this kind of question. It never comes up, except in South Africa. And it’s like a stuck record. And my way of engaging with it is just to ignore it.
Because at the end of the day, I do stuff that’s interesting to me. And as long as I’m honest about what I’m doing, that should be fine in my book.
Pieter's website | Pieter's Instragram account | Pieter's X account | Pieter's page at Stevenson Gallery | Pieter's Wikipedia page | Pieter's Artsy page | Pieter's artnet page
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Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
You can contact Peter on hello@talktopeter.com or get in touch on any of the platforms below. If you are having technical difficulties with the site, please send an email to tech@talktopeter.com
A big thank you to Kirsten Machen and Linda Leow for both suggesting, within days of each other, that I start interviewing people again, and also for the numerous feedback requests. Thanks also to Debbie Sykes for some on-point UX suggestions and to Lorna McDowell for the frequent iPhone testing, Mitzi Pedersen for her eagle eyes, and Travis Lyle for always being there with sensible advice. Thanks to Sharlene Versfeld and Nashen Moodley for helping me to get access to so many amazing people over the years, and to Mirah Von Wicht for all the hugs and support. Special thanks to all my past editors, especially Cyril Madlada, for his immediate faith in me, Debbie Reynolds, for some wonderful working years at the Independent on Saturday and for giving me free reign to produce such eclectic content, to Yves Vanderhaeghen at the Weekend Witness for doing likewise, and to David Daley for our sadly brief working relationship at Salon. And, of course, a massive thank you to everyone who has spoken to me over the years. And finally, warm and appreciative thanks to YOU for reading, watching, and listening, and to my mother Astrid Machen for her boundless and endless love and encouragement.
*It would be remiss of me not to thank the hundreds of generous souls who's contribution to Stackoverflow and other forums provided the knowledge I needed to build this site. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The impulse to share knowledge and solutions is the best thing about the internet.
A big thank you to Kirsten Machen and Linda Leow for both suggesting, within days of each other, that I start interviewing people again, and also for the numerous feedback requests. Thanks also to Debbie Sykes for some on-point UX suggestions and to Lorna McDowell for the frequent iPhone testing. Thanks to Sharlene Versfeld and Nashen Moodley for helping me to get access to so many amazing people over the years, and to Mirah Von Wicht for all the hugs and support. Special thanks to all my past editors, especially Cyril Madlada, for his immediate faith in me, Debbie Reynolds, for some wonderful working years at the Independent on Saturday and for giving me free reign to produce such eclectic content, and to Yves Vanderhaeghen at the Weekend Witness for doing likewise. And, of course, a massive thank you to everyone who has spoken to me over the years. And finally, warm and appreciative thanks to YOU for reading, watching, and listening, and to my mother Astrid Machen for her boundless and endless love and encouragement.
A big thank you to Kirsten Machen and Linda Leow for both suggesting, within days of each other, that I start interviewing people again, and also for the numerous feedback requests. Thanks also to Debbie Sykes for some on-point UX suggestions and to Lorna McDowell for the frequent iPhone testing. Thanks to Sharlene Versfeld and Nashen Moodley for helping me to get access to so many amazing people over the years, and to Mirah Von Wicht for all the hugs and support. Special thanks to all my past editors, especially Cyril Madlada, for his immediate faith in me, Debbie Reynolds, for some wonderful working years at the Independent on Saturday and for giving me free reign to produce such eclectic content, and to Yves Vanderhaeghen at the Weekend Witness for doing likewise. And, of course, a massive thank you to everyone who has spoken to me over the years. And finally, warm and appreciative thanks to YOU for reading, watching, and listening, and to my mother Astrid Machen for her boundless and endless love and encouragement.
A big thank you to Kirsten Machen and Linda Leow for both suggesting, within days of each other, that I start interviewing people again, and also for the numerous feedback requests. Thanks also to Debbie Sykes for some on-point UX suggestions and to Lorna McDowell for the frequent iPhone testing. Thanks to Sharlene Versfeld and Nashen Moodley for helping me to get access to so many amazing people over the years, and to Mirah Von Wicht for all the hugs and support. Special thanks to all my past editors, especially Cyril Madlada, for his immediate faith in me, Debbie Reynolds, for some wonderful working years at the Independent on Saturday and for giving me free reign to produce such eclectic content, and to Yves Vanderhaeghen at the Weekend Witness for doing likewise. And, of course, a massive thank you to everyone who has spoken to me over the years. And finally, warm and appreciative thanks to YOU for reading, watching, and listening, and to my mother Astrid Machen for her boundless and endless love and encouragement.
