Pieter Hugo -The Hyena and Other Men

Not strictly relevant to my current work but I can’t not put a link up to this because I have been showing my contemporaries this work for the past couple of weeks.  His work absolutely blows me away.  A completely different depiction of Africa than I have seen before in anything ranging from the stereotypical portrayals of starving kids of the 80s through to more modern representations by Pieter Van Der Houwen‘s work.

Anyway, check out The Hyena and Other Men on his website

Pieter Hugo

Also, be sure to read the text for the story behind the images.  A couple of sections stand out which make the work of particular importance:

“I look back at the notebooks I had kept while with them. The words ‘dominance’, ‘codependence’ and ‘submission’ kept appearing. These pictures depict much more than an exotic group of travelling performers in West Africa. The motifs that linger are the fraught relationships we have with ourselves, with animals and with nature.”

“Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living. Or why they are economically marginalised. Or why Nigeria, the world’s sixth largest exporter of oil, is in such a state of disarray.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Killing Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.