Helene Love-Allotey
Head of Department
Lot 24W
Pieter Hugo(South African, born 1976)Animal Handler with Ajasco, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007
2 May 2019, 14:00 EDT
New YorkUS$30,000 - US$50,000
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Pieter Hugo (South African, born 1976)
Animal Handler with Ajasco, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007
Signed, titled, dated, inscribed and numbered 'Animal Handler with Ajasco, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007 Edition 3/5 Pieter Hugo' (verso)
C-Print
172.7 x 172.7cm (68 x 68in).
Signed, titled, dated, inscribed and numbered 'Animal Handler with Ajasco, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007 Edition 3/5 Pieter Hugo' (verso)
C-Print
172.7 x 172.7cm (68 x 68in).
Footnotes
Born in 1976 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Pieter Hugo is a self-taught photographer who began familiarizing himself with the camera at age ten. He worked in the film industry in South Africa as a young adult before embarking on a two year residency at Fabrica in Italy, where he was exposed to the up-to-the-minute fashion and print design culture that informed a large part of global culture in the 1990s. Hugo settled in Cape Town on his return home. The Hyena & Other Men, the 2005 series to which this image belongs, is probably his best known work, earning him a World Press Award that year. Singers Beyonce and Nick Cave referenced the images on stage; other wide-spread exposure of the images is arguably responsible for the current era in contemporary African art, inspiring collaborative shows with Zina Saro-Wiwa and others who began to define what we speak of when we invoke "contemporary African art."
Hugo's major museum solo exhibitions include ones at The Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Fotografiska in Stockholm, and MAXXI in Rome. His work is represented in prominent public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum and Huis Marseille. Hugo received the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d'Arles Festival and the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012.
Hugo shoots regularly in a 4X5 format, famously employing a Hasselblad. Asserting that that photography is "inherently voyeuristic," he puts the unease of his relationship to his subjects to use: each image is a conscious confrontation between sitter and image maker. This has been a source of criticism as well as success. Many of his critics, however, do not account for his perhaps unseen but deeply conscious negotiations between self and subject. Even his choice of format--"a larger and more cumbersome format of photography, one that would require negotiating consent and dialogue with the person being photographed--a more sedate and contemplative approach" informs this reflexive practice.
Placidity is a sign of unhealth in baboons. The beast, its posture, is something of the world of taxidermy. The handler is as arresting and theatrical as the beast. He has the air of the dead, but he's unequivocally alive. The beast is named Jaasco. The man is not named but titled: Animal Handler. Though in a large West African city, your mode of employ may mark you more than a name. ("Oh, here comes Emmanuel Taxi Man and Breadseller."). The community of which Jaasco and Animal Handler, rumored to be debt collectors and drug dealers, are a part live on the fringes, more circus men or minstrels, selling native medicine and performing with their animals. The story in this frame is all in the hands, the plantedness of the feet on Lagos sand, the preternatural Harmattan light under the concourse of an assumedly abandoned superhighway. Homelessness and exile, nomadic man and captured wild, modernity and the shiny--all extreme locations of each other. These polarities pick up on ideas that inform Hugo's work--notions of outsidership and otherness that he ascribes to feeling African but remaining white. Hugo trades on myth just as the handlers do: reifying layers of awe and human abjection.
We are grateful to Catherine E. Mckinley for her assistance in the preparation for the above catalogue entry.
Bibliography
The Hyena and Other Men, Will Smith, Museo magazine
