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Pieter Hugo long ago declared the death of portrait photography. You can find his references going back nearly 20 years. When I met Hugo at the end of last year at the Stevenson gallery in Parktown North, where he was hanging the works for his exhibition Polyphonic, he asked: “What can you learn about a person from a photograph?”
The answer is almost nothing, “especially if you strip away the context”, he says. But that never stopped him pointing his camera at people. Polyphonic is a selection of about 100 portraits, from the early 2000s to the present.
It’s a format he’s returned to again and again, sometimes in specific series of portraits, and sometimes in the context of other projects. He says the Stevenson had for some years nurtured the idea of a mini-retrospective — “a show just around my head-and-shoulder portraits”. When he was invited to exhibit at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in France in 2021, the gallery decided to do it.
Hugo never had the chance to see the Arles exhibition, however. “I couldn’t go because of Covid,” he says. A new variant at the time led to a clampdown on travel. Now he’s had a chance to reprise the exhibition in South Africa, with a few additions and variations.
While he initially kicked against the proposal because he didn’t want to be seen as “a one-trick pony”, he was won over by the idea of the new meanings that might be teased out of certain images when removed from other projects and seen alongside other portraits. “I think it’s pretty hard to gauge someone’s intention from a single artwork,” he says. But when you step away from single images and see them all together, it gives you a better sense of what the photographer is trying to do.
Photographers are often accused of exploiting or objectifying their subjects, and a lot has been said about the power relations inherent in various “gazes”: the male gaze that objectifies women; the colonial gaze that dehumanises colonial subjects. While not dismissive of any of those arguments, he maintains that it’s hard to judge the power dynamic between photographer and sitter when looking at a single image. He hoped that by showing an exhibition of just his head-and-shoulders shots, he might complicate those critiques, and show that there can be a humanism at the core of the enterprise. “It’s not just a brutal or critical gaze.”
The same format, returned to over and over, yields different results at different times in Hugo’s oeuvre. “There’s an element of me grappling with the actual language of the head-and-shoulder [portrait],” he says.
“I’m also fascinated with the lexicon of the head-and-shoulder portrait,” he says. Its uses are wide and varied. He rattles off examples in this exhibition. There is the “Identikit-style portrait like we have in the Looking Aside series”. The strict, minimalistic format he used in this early-career series of people with albinism had the subjects all at exactly the same distance from the camera, against a neutral background, looking back at the lens. That way, he deliberately left no space for any kind of context that could be used to make assumptions about the sitter. At the time, Hugo was trying to resist a suspicious kind of “lyricism” that he felt was creeping into local post-apartheid photojournalism.
There’s something wonderful in this unsuspicious, unguarded moment. Such portraits still don’t tell you anything about the subject, but there’s a magic in them that Hugo is always after
He refers to “the portrait as sentimental artefact”. There’s a picture of his daughter that he printed for his home, for example. He’s tried out a strange “forensic” style of the ultraviolet photography that is used by dermatologists to reveal skin damage, and explored the aesthetics of surveillance with infrared photography in a fascinating and unsettling series of passengers asleep on a transatlantic flight.
He speaks of “the portrait as commentary on social aesthetics”. Here he refers to his more recent portrait series Solus, which features young models from an agency specialising in unconventional or atypical beauty.
Hugo is fascinated with people from the margins of society, the outsiders, the homeless, the elderly, sometimes just the strange-looking. But in the mix are presidents past, present and possibly future — Cyril Ramaphosa, Kgalema Motlanthe and FW de Klerk all make appearances in this exhibition. There are artists, Hugo’s friends and family, and rock star Patti Smith, photographed for Harper’s Bazaar. Smith was particularly challenging, Hugo says, because she and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe practically invented a genre of photography in the 1970s.
The images in this exhibition are treated a bit more loosely than some of his individual series. There are photographs in different sizes, some in colour, others in black and white, some tightly cropped, others almost full length. Seeing all these faces together in similar formats has the curious effect, not of monotony, but of emphasising difference and uniqueness. You can’t believe the variety.
But Hugo also gets a kick out of the effect of “giving equal status” to homeless junkies and presidents, another demonstration of the humanism he refers to. Similarly, he sees some of his work as “giving voice” to outsiders. Put differently, a photograph can be empowering. “It’s about wanting to be acknowledged,” he says.
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In his early days, Hugo liked to secure permission from his subjects, and even get them to represent themselves in his portraits. He tended to see his subjects as collaborators. He liked them to return his gaze: looking back at the camera (and by extension anyone who looked at the photo), and confronting it with their own gaze.
While it resolved some problems to do with the power relationship between photographer and subject, he ran into complications. What about blind people? (The people he photographed with albinism often had impaired sight.) He felt a similar discomfort with what he once called the “unreciprocated gaze” when photographing the elderly in old-age homes.
On one level, he tackles the question of permission head-on in Journey, the series of people secretly snapped on the plane. “These portraits are taken, as opposed to given,” Hugo says. In his write-up on the series he cites a statistic that the average Londoner appears on 300 CCTV cameras a day. We are all being photographed without permission all the time.
In the broader context of this exhibition, the good faith of his project prevails. He doesn’t attempt to sanitise photography, he doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of the enterprise — he gravitates towards them.
At one point in our conversation, Hugo says: “I want to look unapologetically.” And that is at the core of what drives him. I’m reminded of one of his descriptions of a moment in which the people he photographs allow themselves “to be held in the gaze of another”. There’s something wonderful in this unsuspicious, unguarded moment. Such portraits still don’t tell you anything about the subject, but there’s a magic in them that Hugo is always after. And that’s more than enough to keep him going, constantly finding new ways to look, and accumulating a record of possibilities.
Polyphonic is on at the Stevenson, Joburg, until February 4 2023.
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