Pieter Hugo… he’s been around for some time, but only last year he managed to impress most of us with The Hyena & Other Men. An amazing series of photographs about the creolization between wilderness and urban, and the relation between man and other species.
His new book, Nollywood, is a mix of horrific characters from the film industry of Africa and reality. Some of his images were at the Paris Photo and he is currently exhibiting Nollywood at Galleria Extraspazio in Rome.
Hugo seems to be going in the direction of an amalgamation of visual, cultural and social elements which give a sense of the fantastic to the worlds he constructs, and at the same time documents.
Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria 2007
I find some neo-colonialist undertones in his work that make it slightly uncomfortable for me. The viciously threatening and sinister characters he photographs seem to only confirm the bestial stereotype of the black African. Hence what is he really constructing, some fantasy world or the sublimated fear of the black man that the West has?
That’s one way to see it, although some of what you say might be true if we consider the massacres which have occurred in the passed ten years, but do we really have a vision of the Afican man as “bestial”? His Nollywood photographs are clearly on characters from the Z-movie horror film industry in Africa, so to confuse it with reality here would be disastrous and would put you into the tabloid reader category of human being, the really bestial stereotype.