© Pieter Hugo
South African photojournalist, Pieter Hugo (Cape Town, 1976), winner of the World Press Photo prize for portraits in 2005 and a finalist in 2012's Deutsche Börse prize, has a new series of his work on display at Barcelona's Fundació Foto Colectania until 10th December. Unlike his previous commissioned projects in neighbouring African countries such as Ghana, Botswana and Nigeria, where the award-winning series The Hyena & Other Men (2005) was set, here Hugo 'comes home' to his native South Africa, a place that he calls, 'fractured, schizophrenic'.
Hugo has explored the relationship between documentary and art in previous work but in this new series makes a more definitive break with photojournalism's rules; its pseudo-objectivity, its emphasis on the hard, fast, visual statement. In taking on a country as vast and complex as his own, one that leads research in the fight against the Ebola virus, yet where many still adhere to the belief that illness is related to witchcraft, Hugo offers no conclusions. Instead, he cites German filmmaker Werner Herzog in his proposal to offer a more genuine 'experiential truth'.
The word 'kin' evokes family ties, close and distant, historical and emotional. The images on show include members of his family, his wife Tamsyn pregnant with their second child, his parents Lize and Gideon in bed, 'dad with his hangover like every day', Ann Sallies, the woman who worked for his parents and 'who raised me'. There are casual encounters, too, most of whom he 'met in bars' and who agreed to pose for him. Landscapes and still life images also contribute to what at first appears a wholly eclectic display, were it not for Hugo's own presence in them, a distinct 'way of looking' that draws them all together.
As a tall, white South African Hugo reluctantly personifies his Dutch colonial heritage, and despite his easy-going manner he is quickly guarded, as if self-consciously aware that his nationality, appearance and profession combined place him in a position of untenable responsibility.
Brought up, 'in a household full of artists', Hugo took up photojournalism by default: 'in the apartheid era there were only photographs that spoke about the social and political situation of the country. Yet I realised very quickly that I didn't enjoy this way of working, that of stepping into a state and quickly getting a picture that gave you a sense of context and meaning and filing it that same evening...'
Kin represents the uncertain conclusion to a slower 'process' that he started eight years before; a time, he says, 'when I was feeling incredibly frustrated and conflicted by the place I lived in. So I thought, let's look at this place, let's look at it hard and really take it on and engage with it.' The result: distinct images that beguile with their harmonic compositions, their painterly vertical or horizontal formats, their earthy colour schemes and almost varnished appearance. Yet come closer, and a sense of conflict is never far beneath the surface. Subjects, though complicit, seem wary, suspicious or even hostile, as if demanding understanding yet offering back only half-truths. Wide empty spaces around them are designed to 'allow the images to breathe', says Hugo, yet they may also seem to press upon them, diminishing or threatening to subsume them.
Tradition and modernity make uneasy companions. Hints of the contemporary banal: a plastic shopping bag, a frilly bedspread, juxtapose with incongruous tartan suits, evocative of another time, another place, or pristine tribal outfits that seem kitsch in their modern setting. In the landscape, Green Point Common (2013), the branches of a tree are swept violently right with the push of a one-directional wind, as if climatic conditions align with equally powerful historical forces.
'When I started working as a photographer I was trying to situate myself in the environment that I was in, and 20 years later it's what I'm still doing,' says Hugo, who admits that the sense of resolution that he'd hoped Kin would bring has eluded him. 'I've failed ... I've ended up even more conflicted,' he says.
Yet the success of Kin is that it transmits exactly this dilemma, and with extraordinary clarity. Hugo's need to find his place in a society so deeply divided, where people, 'seem to speak a different language'. His awareness that he too contributes to this divide as much as he bridges it, empathising with the woman taken from her own family to raise him yet hiring someone like her to look after his own kids. Kin feels like a reintroduction to South Africa, a country so easily vilified or romanticised. But this time it is one made with the door held open.
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Pieter Hugo_Kin_ @ Fundació Foto Colectania, Barcelona until 10th December 2014
@ Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson, Paris from January 2015
all photos © Pieter Hugo, courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, Nueva York
For more of Alx Phillips see: www.lookingfordrama.com
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