The photographer’s ambitious new exhibition What the Light Falls On is a free-ranging meditation on life
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Early on Tuesday morning, Pieter Hugo’s images made him feel emotional.
In the new show Hugo, who became globally famous — for some critics, infamous — with the powerful, engrossing pictures he took between 2005 and 2007 of Nigerian animal handlers and itinerant minstrels with their hyenas, baboons and rock pythons, has shifted his focus to birth, death and the rites between.
“It’s just, at the end of the day, a pile of stones. But you know those piles of stones of Palestinian villages that have been destroyed built new roads for Israeli settlements.”“Details of this lady collecting firewood in the Karoo.” Hugo is turning 48 next week. In the exhibition notes he says in middle age “one is getting softer both physically and emotionally”.“I think there’s a subtlety in this work that maybe wasn’t in other projects of mine,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a happy ending, right, like for something to begin, something’s got to end and for something to end there’s a loss.”“Very much so. Jeez.
These days, most of Hugo’s work is global. As with his famous African works, he would piggyback his own projects on it. “I love this picture … it just feels so like an American Gothic. Ocean View, South African Gothic. I love it.“That’s my wife. This is an old-age home in Goodwood.” “Suddenly, when I added that picture in the mix. I was like, ‘Oh, I should look at this from birth to death.’
“It was, it was super interesting. They kept on taking selfies with me,” he says with a laugh. “They got a lot out of their experience, financially, indirectly, in the long run.”“I’m not the same person that made those pictures at that time. So, the pictures are fine but it’s just not … It doesn’t have the same energy.”
“And it has informed my work. I think there’s a lot of validity in some of the criticisms that I’ve faced over the years. And I think I, as a practitioner, have grown.
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