Pieter Hugo

Pieter Hugo has garnered critical acclaim for his series of portraits and landscapes, each of which explore a facet of his native South Africa and neighboring African countries, including the film sets of Nigerias Nollywood; and toxic garbage dumps in Ghana; and 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 within a few miles of Hugo''s home over the past decade, focuses instead on the photographers family, his community, and himself. Writer John Mahoney characterizes it as the artists 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.