Pieter Hugo: Kin - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Pieter Hugo (born 1976) has garnered critical acclaim for his series of portraits and landscapes, each of which explores a facet of his native South Africa and neighboring African countries, including the film sets of Nigeria's Nollywood; toxic garbage dumps in Ghana; sites of mass executions in Rwanda; as well as albinos, the Hyena Men of Nigeria, honey collectors and garbage scavengers. "Kin," a collection of images shot throughout South Africa over the past decade, focuses instead on the photographer's family, his community and himself. Writer John Mahoney characterizes it as the artist's first major work to focus exclusively on his personal experience in his native South Africa, a place defined by centuries of political, cultural and racial tensions and contradictions. Hugo describes his series as "an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being 'colonial driftwood.' South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place ... How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent should one try? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society?" This work attempts to address these questions and reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives.

Review Quotes

Pieter Hugo's fine new book Kin, his most personal project so far, made me go back once again to Cornell Capa's The Concerned Photographer, published in 1968 to commemorate an exhibition of work by Werner Bischof, Leonard Freed, André Kertész, David Seymour, Dan Weiner and Capa's late brother, Robert. Like them, Hugo is a concerned photographer - someone, in Capa's words, whose role "is to witness and to be involved with his subjects;" someone whose work "demands personal commitment and concern for mankind." although he would probably be uncomfortable with Capa's rhetoric, Hugo brings exactly that kind of thoughtful dedication to all his work, but it's especially apparent here. Kin is, broadly, a book about South Africa - a measured sequence of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. On the surface, it's a rigorously unsentimental photojournalistic survey; underneath, it's a sprawling, layered, and uneasy self-portrait.--Vince Aletti"Photograph Magazine" (03/01/2015)

The images combine his mastery of hues and composition with an almost fey sense of strange subject matter - like a cross between the bizarre alchemy in Roger Ballen's work and the colorful absurdity of Martin Parr's. Yet Hugo's world is uniquely his own, in all its weird and decaying beauty.--Jack Crager"American Photo" (03/23/2015)

These are brave, bold photographs taken with an inquisitive eye.--The Editors"Esquire UK" (03/01/2015)