Pieter Hugo: This Must Be the Place

Pieter Hugo: This Must Be the Place by TJ Demos. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9783791346892.

Filled with startling portraits of Africas raw and tragic beauty, this first retrospective of Pieter Hugos award-winning work collects the most important images from the photographers career to date. Pieter Hugo has been documenting his native continent of Africa since his late teens. An autodidact, he was eventually drawn to portraiture, an interest that culminated with his hugely popular book, The Hyena and Other Men. Since that book, Hugo has continued to earn high praise while testing the limits of the traditional portrait. As Aperture magazine observes, "Hugo maneuvers through the muddy waters of political engagement, documentary responsibility, and the relationship of these to his own aesthetic." In the books Nollywood and Permanent Error he suffuses a journalists perspective and a voyeurs theatricality into images of Africas people and environment. This retrospective volume collects photographs from each of his earlier series as well as portraits and landscapes that have never been shown or published before. Essays by three esteemed photographic critics contextualize Hugos career Hugos career within the realm of contemporary photography. Full-page color illustrations highlight Hugos extraordinary talent for teasing out the subtleties in otherwise stark images.