My best shot Art and design Pieter Hugo's best photograph: the hyena men of Nigeria

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1 My best shot Art and design Pieter Hugo's best photograph: the hyena men of Nigeria They would beat drums to draw a crowd. Then they d take the muzzles off the hyenas and put their heads between their jaws Interview by Edward Siddons Thu 19 Jul 2018 I first learned about Nigeria s hyena men in 2005, thanks to a picture that had gone viral. The caption said they were debt collectors in Lagos. I knew I had to find them. The country has a population of 186 million people, though, so the odds were pretty low. But then in 2017 a journalist friend told me they come from his home town, Kano, in the north. Two weeks later, I was on my way. The hyena men are itinerants: they never spend more than two days anywhere. I found them in a shanty town near Abuja, the capital. Despite the language barrier we got to know each other pretty quickly. Outside of Lagos and Port Harcourt, I didn t see a single white person in Nigeria. So I probably seemed as odd to them as a guy walking a hyena in the street seemed to me. We smoked some weed to break the ice. It turned out they weren t debt collectors they were more like town criers, traditional storytellers who performed in the streets and sold potions after their shows. It reminded me of stories I d read about eastern European circus troupes in the 1930s except instead of bears, these guys had hyenas, baboons and pythons. Seeing them perform was unforgettable. It was a huge spectacle. They would beat drums to draw in the crowds, then take the muzzles off the hyenas. Next they d put their arms and even their heads between the animals jaws. The aim was to convince the audience they had special powers, and that the audience could acquire them too, if they bought their potions. At first I tried photographing the street shows, but there was just too much going on. Then I realised that the relationship between man and beast was more interesting than all the fireworks of the performance. There was something very strange going on between the guys and the hyenas, bordering on sadomasochism. These animals had been taken out of the wild as pups. They couldn t return. They were entirely dependent on these guys for food. And these men were dependent on the animals for their livelihoods. They needed each other, but it wasn t an easy symbiosis. I didn t have too much trouble with the hyenas. If you feed and water them, they re cool, they re happy. But the baboons were a lot more problematic. Baboons are just so close to humans. They have much more emotionally complex needs, I think. The guys had scratch marks everywhere from the baboons they were always getting into fights. I don t think the baboons were happy. I love how confrontational this shot is. At no point did I tell him how to pose. It s all him. He flexed his bicep, stared straight at me, while his hyena jumped all over him. Then in the background, there s this kind of Mad Max landscape strewn with broken-down trucks, though you can hardly see them because of the light. It was harmattan season, a time between November and March when the sands of the Sahara blow over western Africa creating this murky, diffused lighting, which I love. It s a simple shot with an incredible economy. I wish I could take more like it. Pieter Hugo s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is at the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, until 8 October. Pieter Hugo s CV Born: Johannesburg, South Africa, 1976 Studied: Self-taught. Influences: JM Coetzee, Claire Denis, Charlie Brown. High point: My mid-career survey show at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in Low point: Having all my equipment and film stolen after a two-month shooting trip in Nepal. Top tip: Be vigilant. Be pure. Beware.

2 February 18, 2017 Pieter Hugo YOSSI MILO GALLERY 245 Tenth Avenue January 26 March 11 The born free generation of South Africans those born after the fall of apartheid in 1994 has recently come into the limelight as protest movements such as #FeesMustFall or #RhodesMustFall have swept university campuses and city streets. The country s youth have rallied against the intensification of economic disparity and the lingering effects of historical traumas. As time passes, the Mandela-era dream of the rainbow nation seems to slide further away. South African photographer Pieter Hugo offers a more enigmatic vision of this generation with his series 1994, , employing portraiture as a means to signify, however obliquely, the immense cultural transitions it has witnessed. While the eldest born-frees are in their twenties, Hugo s subjects are younger children, some mere toddlers, from both South Africa and Rwanda (where 1994 marked the unspeakable horrors of genocide). Pieter Hugo, Portrait #3, Rwanda, 2014, digital C-print. From the series 1994, Hugo is lauded for his disquieting, almost feral aesthetic; he has photographed those on the fringes of society throughout southern and West Africa. Here, though, the work is somewhat more metaphysical: Children are made archetypes of contestation, survival, and hope. They face the camera, seated or recumbent, posed within verdant landscapes or against the looming edifices of rural schools. One of his most arresting images, Portrait #3, Rwanda, 2014, shows a Rwandan girl, draped head to toe in palepink fabric, seated on the ground. She gazes forward solemnly as she extends a flower branch and a green frond. Elsewhere, boys and girls in oversize soiled frocks recline against grass and dry earth or pose near mossy trees. These settings invoke the unpredictability and even the cruelty of wilderness, while the children s clothing, mostly donated from Europe, locates them within a discordant contemporary moment. The photographer s gaze is inquisitive and searching his subjects respond with an onerous sense of clairvoyance. Allison Young

3 A Conversation with Pieter Hugo Xenophobia, Self-Censorship, and the commodity of Blackness June 18, 2015 By Michael Salu

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11 May 3, 2015 South African photographer Pieter Hugo has exhibited his work in major galleries and museums around the world. His photographs have depicted violence, poverty, and the scars of colonialism in Africa, as well as more intimate moments of domestic life. Last spring, Hugo came to the San Francisco Bay Area on a fellowship from the Headlands Center for the Arts. He and his wife, Tamsyn, enrolled their daughter in a day-care program near City Hall. After dropoff on the first day, Tamsyn found herself walking through the nearby Tenderloin. Despite butting up against some of the city s most affluent neighborhoods, the Tenderloin, like Skid Row in Los Angeles, has long been known mostly as a hub of poverty and crime. Prostitution, drugs, and homelessness are ubiquitous. When Tamsyn saw a man shooting up in his neck, she called Hugo, who s known for his portraits of people in marginalized communities. You ve got to come down here, she told him. I normally do a lot of research, but I didn t do that this time, says Hugo. Instead he began taking walks around the area, striking up conversations, and shooting quickly, spontaneously. He was distressed by the mental illness and addiction he witnessed in the three months he spent taking these photographs. The people I shot were calm with me, he says, and then a moment later, they d be screaming at someone. But he did not set out to document destitution. He hoped, instead, to capture life in a neighborhood seemingly apart from its city and its time an anarchic community in the midst of a crazy boom.

12 These stories were reported and written over the course of one recent week, from many different corners of the Tenderloin. S R O The Tenderloin is the point of entry for many who arrive in San Francisco. With its singleroom-occupancy hotels and immigrant community, the neighborhood has long served as an initial foothold in the city. Yet that same supply of cheap housing, along with a cluster of social-service providers, can also make the neighborhood, more cruelly, a final destination for folks trying to hang on in an expensive city. I know this because for me, the Tenderloin was both. My first day in San Francisco, fresh off the freight trains from back East, I found a place in an old hotel on a small alley at the edge of the neighborhood. I made a writing desk by placing a piece of wood over the sink in my room. I remember finding a hiding place above my window where someone had nested a single unused hypodermic needle. I had wanted to move to San Francisco to be a writer, and here I was. At night, the hotel s neon sign bathed my room in a pink glow. In the rest of the city, the dot-com boom was shifting into gear, but in the Tenderloin, old-timers sat around their lobbies, listening to ballgames on the AM radio or reading paperback crime novels or waiting for the pay phone to ring. Men on corners talked to themselves, as if broadcasting a station that only they could hear. I remember the smell of wet newspaper and weak doughnut-shop coffee, the persistent scrape of men collecting cans. It was easy to disappear. You could leave the daylight world and turn down a long hotel hallway or into a darkened bar. There, you could go underground for good, like the man

13 S O U P K I T C H E N with the white beard who told me he d first come to the city to stop the war during the Summer of Love or the drag queen who claimed to have set cop cars on fire in the White Night Riots. She smiled while she drank, remembering thousands of men dancing shirtless in the sun during Gay Freedom Day parades on Market Street. In the downtown library, I found another kind of hiding place: an ancient file cabinet stuffed with folders of faded local news clippings. All had been cut out by hand and pasted onto white paper with the newspaper name and the date hours of work performed by an unknown librarian. I d begun photographing the neighborhood s neon signs, so I came back and pasted my photos onto white paper, labeling them by address and adding them to a new file that I marked tenderloin bar and hotel signs. Not too long after that, I moved to another neighborhood, and indeed I did become a writer. But the money wasn t too good and I eventually found myself back in the Tenderloin. By now the neighborhood really was disappearing. Rents were soaring as tech firms moved in. When my building eventually sold, I knew what would come next. I listened to baseball games on the radio. I read crime novels. Then, a day came when I stood on Market Street, shaking hands with my lawyer after we d negotiated a settlement with my landlord. I would use the money to start over in a new city. As we walked past the library, I thought of an old drawer full of newspaper clippings. I tried to remember what it had felt like to be young and so in love with this place. But all I could remember was my first hotel and its flickering sign, glowing pink through the night. ERICK LYLE The dining room at St. Anthony s, a Tenderloin-based nonprofit that provides food, medical care, and other services to those in need, serves up to 3,000 meals a day. Forty percent of the free meals in San Francisco are served there. Marilyn Chan, who is 64 years old, has been living in the Tenderloin since the mid-1980s, when she first came to St. Anthony s for help. People call her the Mama of the Loin. This neighborhood is the place I spend the majority of my time. I ve been here for so long. It s my comfort zone. I ve been homeless, but I m OK now. I live in an SRO on Eddy, and I m giving back to my community. I volunteer at my senior center. I go outside and there s one or two people every day, they remember my name. Sometimes I can t remember their names; I know faces. The guys say, Hey, Mama, and I say, Hey, how are you? They ll stop and give me a hug. Oh yeah, I ve been in the Loin for a while. I know some people don t like it because we have the drug dealers that hang around, but today it s not too bad. The cops are out there. I don t care what the drug dealers do, but please, stay on the side, give me a path to walk through the sidewalk. One time I was walking up Leavenworth, and a guy told me to go walk in the street, and I said, Why should I, you re younger than I am! I didn t mean to be mean. One of the guys, his buddy, came up to me later, and he says, Sorry, Mama. I said, It s OK. They give me respect. Some people don t like that expression: Mama. But they re respecting elders, and it doesn t bother me. People ask me, Where do you live? and I say, The Loin. And they say, Is that bad? and I say, No! Each person s different. It s a mix of everybody now. I ve been on [affordable-housing] waiting lists since At that time, out of 32,000, I was number 28,000. Bottom of the bucket. I m still waiting. AS TOLD TO BONNIE TSUI

14 I T A L I A N J O I N T There s often a row of police motorcycles parked on the corner of Larkin and Post, outside a restaurant called Little Henry s. At 2 p.m. on a warm Wednesday, four officers sit together at the table farthest from the door, eating giant plates of pasta. Two are Asian, one is black, and one is white; SFPD couldn t hope for a better representation of the neighborhood s demographics. Henry is working the register, like he does most days. He s Chinese, but he s got the details of his no-frills Italian place down pat, from the redand-white-checked tablecloths to the old-school smocks his cooks are wearing. I order spaghetti and make small talk with one of the cops. He s been working in the Tenderloin for about three years, and he tells me that it s changed a lot during that time. Mostly for the better, he says. Still a lot of blocks you shouldn t walk at night, though. It can be tough work. He says there are more robberies and drug offenses at the top of the month, more violence toward the end. I ask another cop what his favorite part of the job is. A lot of good people live in this neighborhood, he says. Hundreds of little kids go to school here. Sometimes you see a group of them walking together down the street, holding each other s hands, being led by their teachers. My order arrives, with a bowl of clam chowder and a big hunk of bread. Through the window, we see a gaunt girl she can t be older than 16 circling the block repeatedly. She s talking to herself, walking fast, apparently looking for something. Seems pretty urgent, one of the officers jokes. A while later, they get up from the table in unison. Outside, they stand at their motorcycles for a few beats. They re putting on a bit of a show, taking longer than they really need to get their helmets on and buckle their jackets. I pay at the counter and ask Henry why he thinks so many cops hang out at his place. He pauses, shrugs, then hands me my change. I ve been here for 32 years, and they ve been coming since I opened, he says. They come here now because they ve always come here. ERIC STEUER D R A G B A R It s a Sunday evening at Aunt Charlie s Lounge, an off night for a bar whose walls practically ring with the shrieks of parties past. A magnet for brides-to-be, punk queers, tech hipsters, and gay elders clinging to their rent-controlled apartments with their chipped manicures, this is the spot for a drag show in San Francisco, never mind that there s no stage for a hardy queen the world is a stage, and the girls at Aunt Charlie s are tough. Like the dear departed Vicki Marlane, who ran the show here during her day; now the block is named for her. I ve watched performance artist Ben McCoy crawl the carpet and stomp the bar during her outrageous numbers. Shows with names like Sleaze, Tubesteak Connection, and Suicide Tuesday bring a John Waters esque camp to the neighborhood s seedy reputation. San Francisco, once the gayest city in the world, can t keep its gay bars open. Last year the Latina drag bar Esta Noche shut its doors, and the storied Lexington Club, the city s premier dyke bar, closed last month. In this way, Aunt Charlie s is a miracle: a staunch holdout, a stubborn reminder that the city was once a haven for sexual outlaws, the Tenderloin the province of trans women who rioted against harassment at the old Compton s Cafeteria months before Stonewall erupted in New York City. On this empty Sunday, I marvel at how tiny the joint is. Busted plastic chandeliers above my head twinkle like real crystal; I imagine the missing pieces were snatched

15 by a desperate queen in need of emergency jewels. The foul-smelling carpet stretches its casino pattern from the floor up the side of the bar, wood-topped and spotted with cigarette burns from smokier eras. Saturdays you might need a reservation to see the show, but tonight it s a fine place to sit with a drink by yourself. I finish my Coke and leave the soft pink haze for the harsh flash of cop cars double-parked along Turk Street, aka Vicki Mar Lane. MICHELLE TEA P H O S H O P Around lunchtime on a Friday, there s a long queue for the free showers at Jones and Ellis. Across the street, Pho Tan Hoa is a different world: bright lights, loud chatter in three or four languages, even its own climate warmer and more humid, weather like soup. Men in bright construction vests, on their break from a project at Macy s, slurp from bowls of noodles heaped high with slices of beef. Little boys in glasses sit in the back, playing ipad games. There s a printed-out sign taped onto a greenish-blue fish tank: PLEASE DO NOT SCARE AND FEED THE FISH!!! PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE FISH TANK!!! THANK YOU!!! The resident fish wears a downturned mustache. It looks ancient and unperturbable. The restaurant, which used to be called Pho Hoa, has been in the Tenderloin for about 25 years; the Tan Hoa family bought it eight years ago. Abe, a slim Asian man in a jacket and button-down and nice shoes, confesses he s been here four times in the three weeks he s lived in San Francisco. The bowl that contains his combination beef pho is close to 16 inches in diameter big enough to bathe a rabbit in. I usually don t finish all the noodles, he admits. But I love the broth. Rodney, eating alone by the stoic fish s tank, stands out: a black man, maybe in his 40s, wearing tiny Transitions glasses that have not transitioned to clear. He eats there once a week, maybe more. His usual order is pho, he says, because I had an Asian girlfriend a long time ago, and this is one of the things that she introduced me to. The clientele is mostly Asian, very few African Americans, some Caucasians sprinkled in, Rodney says. Which is cool. I ve always had a great interest in the Asian culture. Lifelong. I m taking an Asian American studies class right now. It s all because of Bruce Lee. Two octogenarian girlfriends with short perms hang out near the double front doors, leaning on their walkers. They stare when I speak English. Do you speak Cantonese? I ask in Cantonese, and they brighten, but unfortunately, that s all I know how to say in Cantonese. RACHEL KHONG A F F O R D A B L E H O U S I N G On a recent afternoon in her family s sunny Tenderloin apartment, sweet with the scent of steamed rice, 15-month-old Holly Lin climbs into an entertainment console, straddles the arm of a futon, scrambles on top of a stool, and rocks on a plastic dragon. Her mother, Miao Ling, catches and cuddles Holly when she veers too wildly, and her father, Jun Jie, distracts her with a bouncy ball. Holly and her 9-year-old brother, Howard, are among the 3,000 or so children living in the Tenderloin, more than half of them Asian. When the Lins emigrated from China in 2008, they lived in a Chinatown SRO where they fought to use the communal kitchen and bathrooms. They were thrilled when a one-bedroom opened up in a Chinatown Community Development Center affordable-housing building at Turk and Jones, nearly 600 square feet to themselves. They didn t know about the neighborhood s reputation

16 until after they moved in, but they adapted: If they see homeless people sacked out on the sidewalk or someone urinating or defecating in public, they take another route. Miao Ling has even turned these sights into a lesson for her son: See, if you don t study hard, you end up like that. The family regularly walks over to Chinatown to shop where the prices are cheaper, the language and selection familiar. But in the late afternoon, they retreat to their building s courtyard, dotted with trees, benches, and a playground built on a rubbery green-andblue surface. Holly stuffs twigs, paper scraps, whatever she can find into her mouth while tweens in hijabs, jeans, and Ugg boots balance on a climbing structure. One of the Lins neighbors, a Yemeni grandmother in a long gray dress and red hijab, passes out crackers and croons, Thank you, thank you. Neighbor me, neighbor good. VANESSA HUA C O R N E R S T O R E Irfan Ali is holding four packs of hot dogs. He s restocking a fridge in his store, Cadillac Market, on the corner of Eddy and Hyde, on a Saturday afternoon. Ali, trim and friendly in a collared shirt and slacks, tells me many of his customers are regulars. We do tabs to help people buy food. It s only for people we recognize, who pay every month. A skinny white guy in a dirty T-shirt looks carefully at all the bottled-water options while holding a can of King Cobra malt liquor. He pulls out a bottle of Crystal Geyser. The store is open from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. I get people on drugs who come in and throw candy around, says Ali, who grew up in Pakistan and lives in Hayward with his wife and kids. We used to call the police, but they don t come fast enough. So if the customers curse, we say thank you. But if I have a bad day, I get in arguments. A Latino guy wearing a backpack and blue baseball cap comes in and buys a pack of cigarettes. A few minutes later, he returns and buys a shrimp-flavored bowl of dehydrated noodles. More than a year ago, the police told us we had to remove the boards from inside our windows. People bang on the glass at night, so I was worried. The police make all the markets do the same because if someone keeps us hostage, they want to be able to see in the store. A Middle Eastern guy dressed in a gray button-down and carrying a leather messenger bag buys a bottle of Tisdale shiraz. Ten other customers buy single beers or cans of malt liquor over the course of an hour and a half; one man slips his Bud into his own wrinkled brown-paper bag. People think the Tenderloin is the worst neighborhood in the city, but we have the 24-hour foot traffic, which makes it safer. Ali is using a tag gun to stick prices onto the lids of potato-salad containers. A white guy in a red Orange County Choppers T-shirt, leaning slightly on a cane, points at him and tells the cashier, He said I could have anything in this store for free! Ali smiles. The guy buys a fifth of Smirnoff and says to Ali, Tag my head! Ali replies, You re not worth it. Guy: C mon! Ali presses the tag gun gently to his forehead. Now you re $1.99, he says. An older black woman in sweats and a fisherman s hat, missing two bottom teeth, buys Cheetos Puffs, Oatmeal Cremes, and a microwaveable cheeseburger, plus a pack of Wings cigarettes. The cashier pulls a piece of cardboard from under the counter with her name handwritten on the top. He writes in the cost of her purchases. That s one of the regulars with a tab, Ali says. She has no money right now. CAITLIN ROPER

17 S I D E W A L K S I like the library I go there often. I walk down Leavenworth, make a right on Geary, then a left on Larkin, and I do not deviate, ever, from that route. After six years of living in the Tenderloin, I ve learned that it s the least likely to give me problems. Sometimes I can t convince myself getting there is worth it. On hot days I can taste the smell of human piss. I move between bony people scurrying by and swollen people passed out and baking in the sun. I don t stop anymore to make sure they re breathing. When did that happen? The hookers, out as early as 10 a.m., often smile at me as I pass. Some are so strung out I wonder if they can even see me. The others suppose I look like someone who might smile back, and on good days I can. Most days I feel sad about them for blocks. The night prostitutes are burly and work up on Post in tightly stretched tank tops and skirts like headbands. They re affectionate, laughing and hanging off of one another on the corners, shivering and waving at cars. Always with the Hey, girl! to me. But they don t come out until it s dark. I walk down the east side of Larkin to avoid an ever-present line of dealers, all men. There s always a delay between realizing that someone is following me and collecting all of myself to turn around and tell him to stop. On this side of the street is a laundromat, which generally means more women and families. A little girl trails behind a stroller, holding onto the bottom of her mother s shirt. Her mouth is open and she s tripping over her feet, looking back at a row of people slouched against the scissor gate of a vacant store. One man is setting up a street sale scuffed high heels, some DVDs, and greasy flip phones laid out neatly on a bedsheet. By the time I can see the library, men in suits are waiting at red lights next to me. There s one last bad patch, on the grass right in front of the library, but by that point I feel like I ve made it. I turn around to answer a tall older man, stiffly bent forward at the waist, with a tinny radio in his pocket. Scuse me, sis He holds out four quarters pressed between his thumb and index finger. His nails are black. Sometimes this gimmick leaves me with 80 cents one nickel in the middle of the stack in exchange for my dollar bill. I know what my chances are, but from time to time I play along. This time it s four quarters. SUMMER SEWELL O F F I C E A slow trickle of fit, mostly bearded, mostly tattooed men flow in and out of a small, utilitarian office sandwiched between a bodega and an apartment complex on Ellis Street. It s early afternoon on a recent Thursday, and the olive-green walls of this cramped space are covered in graffiti-style artwork, stickers, and drawings. Wooden benches and stools line the room, a stack of board games fills one shelf, and a halfdozen bikes are parked in a rack on the tile floor. Most of the men are killing time between the lunch and dinner rush, when they ll hop on their bikes and zip all over the city, carting food, flowers, and anything else you can get delivered in today s app-powered, on-demand economy. They re employees of TCB Courier, a five-year-old company that hooks delivery services up with bike messengers. TCB s 50 messengers sometimes do 15 deliveries over their five-hour shifts, says Jonathan Tesnakis, one of the company s 11 co-owners. TCB opened its headquarters in the Tenderloin a year and a half ago because the area was cheap and central, and the company could get a ground-floor space key for hauling bikes. About a year after TCB moved in, their office was broken into. Twice.

18 They installed a roll-down gate that they shut every night and haven t had a problem since. When the gate rolls up in the morning, it reveals a logo on TCB s front window that reads Gettin Muddy, Gettin Cutty ( Cutty is Bay Area slang for something that s sort of sketchy, but cool). It s meant to refer to TCB s cyclocross team, which is sponsored by a local bar, but it could just as easily describe the neighborhood. KATIE FEHRENBACHER D I V E B A R Weekday-afternoon sun pours through the 21 Club s grimy window, lighting up the bottles and the peeling ceiling paint and the rattling floor fan and the bobblehead dolls and the beads and the rifle and the thumbtacked snapshots and the bumper sticker that says something about supporting U.S. flagships. From the old jukebox, Rod Stewart, then Aretha. Eight or nine customers in flannel shirts and sweatpants, a few with canes, one with a beret, another in big shades sit or stand around the place; most are over 60, and many have come in daily for years. They are warm and chatty, bantering about the news and the days of the Merchant Marines and about values like how much value you d get when you ordered the chops at the original Original Joe s. Callie pours a beer over half-melted ice. She s a chuckler, a holler-across-the-bar sort. Her mother danced at the old Playboy Club. Decades ago, she claims, their family owned 80 Tenderloin bars. Owned this one, too her aunt did, as she explains it. One day the aunt walked in on her husband in bed with another woman. She shot him and did ten years, Callie says, but first transferred ownership to another relative, who then transferred it to Frank, the current owner. Also here is Simon, who d wanted to see the world. He left his hometown seven hours north of Stockholm, he says, and arrived in San Francisco. He checked into a hostel that first night and found the nearest bar. Frank s bar. Simon, who works here now, hands Jungle Jim a White Russian. Jungle Jim has powerful old arms coming out from an old vest, and a powerful mustache, and a tiny dream catcher hanging improbably from a wicker hat. He introduces himself as James, says he grew up in the Mission when being black wasn t so rare and when there was respect and when burritos were 75 cents. He drives trucks. Just pour more Kahlúa over the dregs, he tells Simon when his White Russian depletes. Across the street, sprawled at Turk and Taylor, everyone seems broken, twitchy, and forlorn. Inside, maybe some are broken, too, but broken and happy, and convivial, and discussing a funny thing that happened here in I hear nobody discussing how all this will go away in June, when the 21 Club becomes another $12 cocktail place. What s left to say? Anyway, the afternoon s too nice for moping, the sun now lower on the back wall but still orange. Callie tells me her grandmother said a neighborhood changes every 20 years. Maybe the thing to do is be glad the bar beat the odds as long as it did and pour another beer over your ice. CHRIS COLIN

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23 PIETER HUGO January 30, 2015 Photography Dea K. Pieter Hugo is a South-African portrait and documentary photographer, recognized for capturing images of the continent s marginalized peoples, including the blind, albinos, and AIDS victims in their coffins, all carrying strange and lingering power. Hugo was born in 1976 in Johannesburg and grew up in Cape Town. He is a self-taught photographer, with no formal education, primary because there wasn t a space where one would get an education about theory and history of photography. After finishing high school, he went straight into becoming a practicing photographer, whether it was commercial work or editorial work or working as a photojournalist. Hugo initially worked in the film industry in Cape Town, before spending two years in Italy at Fabrica, a research center for artists. As a white South African photographer, Hugo is acutely aware of the problems of representation that hover around his work, which merges documentary, portraiture, still life and landscape. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of South African society and the legacy of

24 apartheid casts a long shadow. For him, documentary photography is a type of ecstatic experience where one looks at the pictures and one experiences truth, even if it s not the truth of an accountant. Hugo understands that a photographic metaphor, a way of describing something through reference to something else, is created as much by the elements inside the frame of the image itself as by the carefully chosen distance, the so-called critical zone, from the photographer s lens to his subject. It is within this zone that Hugo maneuvers through the muddy waters of political engagement, documentary responsibility, and the relationship of these to his own aesthetic. Hugo traveled extensively to countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Liberia, photographing along this way gang members, taxi washers, AIDS victims, albinos, and the blind. His first major photo collection Looking Aside consisted of a collection of portraits of people whose appearance makes us look aside, his subjects including the blind, people with albinism, the aged, his family and himself. Each man, woman and child poses in a sterile studio setting, under crisp light against a blank background. The uniformity of his approach puts sole emphasis on their physical appearance. Hugo s most well-known series, The Hyena and Other Men, was executed between 2005 and 2007, and was later published as a monograph. The series depicts a group of traveling performers from Lagos, Nigeria, who use wild animals as a part of their act. Hugo traveled with the group for 2 years to capture images of the animal handlers and the intriguing love-hate relationship between them and the wild animals. There are times when the men are affectionate to the wild animals while cruel and abusive at other times. The work is characterized by stark, graphic depiction of its subject matter. He has also photographed Rwandan landscapes, scavengers at a toxic dump in Ghana and the Nollywood film industry. He now turns his attention to his still-troubled homeland, with intriguing and sometimes provocative results. The artist s work was exhibited in numerous group and solo shows, and he has received several awards throughout his career, including first prize in the Portraits section of World Press Photo in 2005, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2007, the KLM Paul Huf Award, and the Arles Discovery Award at the Rencontres d Arles Photography Festival in Pieter Hugo lives and works in Cape Town.

25 Tuesday 10 September, 2013 Pieter Hugo: seeing South Africa anew Kin, a moving new exhibition in New York, asks troubling questions about the photographer's conflicted homeland Pieter Hugo describes his new series, Kin, currently on show at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, as "an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being colonial driftwood". Hugo is best known for his dramatic 2007 series, The Hyena & Other Men. It depicted the nomadic lives of Nigeria's gadawan kura (hyena handlers), who use the animals to entertain crowds. He has also photographed Rwandan landscapes, scavengers at a toxic dump in Ghana and the Nollywood film industry. He now turns his attention to his still-troubled homeland, with intriguing and sometimes provocative results. As a white South African photographer, Hugo is acutely aware of the problems of representation that hover around his work, which merges documentary, portraiture, still life and landscape. "South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place," he writes in a short essay about the show. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society here and the legacy of apartheid casts a long shadow "

26 Hugo's work brings up the dilemma of how to portray these issues photographically, outside the genres of reportage and photojournalism. The show brings together six years of work and marks a move towards a more personalised, introspective approach. "How does one live in this society?" he asks. "How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent does one have to? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me. Now they are more confusing." Hugo says his work attempts to look at what he calls "conflicting personal and collective narratives". The show features Hugo's large-scale portraits of family and friends alongside the drifters and homeless people he encounters from all over South Africa. A full-length portrait of his pregnant wife hangs alongside two powerful head-and-shoulder portraits of outsiders: a man with a drooping eye and unreadable stare; another man with a defiant air and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Elsewhere, there are equally dramatic juxtapositions: a self-portrait of Hugo cradling his newborn daughter who shares a room with a photo of the first gay couple to get married in a traditional African wedding ceremony. There are images of the women who worked for his parents and helped raise him, as well as a wonderful group portrait of young men who had just completed their initiation into manhood (and who are, for some reason, all dressed in matching tweed suits from Daks).

27 By turns beautiful and disturbing, the exhibition is a kind of personal psychological study of Hugo's conflicted homeland. Some viewers may have problems with some of the undeniably beautiful images, particularly of the homeless and the troubled. Hugo is one of the great photographers of our time, and these portraits have a strange and lingering power. One image At a Traffic Intersection, Johannesburg, 2011 depicts a homeless man in an almost holy pose. It is a lasting image with an intimacy that is at odds with the subject matter. This is one of Hugo's gifts: to make us see South Africa anew and question what we think we know about the place, not to mention photography's depiction of it. "I have deeply mixed feelings about being here," Hugo writes. "I am interested in the places where these (conflicting personal and collective) narratives collide. Kin is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society's ideals and its realities." Ambitious and challenging, the show continues one of the most intriguing journeys in contemporary photography.

28 -By Jean Dykstra 09/10/2013 Pieter Hugo s Kin, on view at Yossi Milo Gallery through October 19, is the photographer s most restrained and thoughtful body of work to date. Earlier series, such as The Hyena & Other Men,Nollywood, and Permanent Error, lent themselves to visual flamboyance: itinerant performers traveling with enormous pet hyenas; surreally costumed actors in Nollywood, Nigeria s film industry; or apocalyptic images of young people on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, picking through the debris in burning waste dumps. Critics have denounced Hugo, a white South African who lives in Cape Town, for exoticizing his subjects in these photographs, but the images are Kin are more subdued, illustrating, instead, the web of connections that ties Hugo himself, even As the title suggests, Kin follows an ever-widening circle of connections and associations, some biological, some simply geographical. There is a photograph of his pregnant wife, naked, as well as a self-portrait of Hugo with his newborn daughter, and aportrait of Ann Sallies who worked for my parents and helped raise their children. The personal takes a back seat to the political in other pictures: a picture of a homeless man in Johannesburg, for instance, and a portrait of two men, Thoba Calvin and Tshepo Cameron Sithole, both in ceremonial dress, embracing on a frilly white bedspread. Though this information is not in the exhibition, Calvin and Sithole were married in South Africa, a country with a record of violence toward gays and lesbians, in a ceremony that combined Zulu and Tswana traditions. The portraits are interspersed with interiors and still lifes grapes, a gourd, and a dried-out melon on a table against a pockmarked wall; a worn teddy bear slouched in a chair next to a television set that offer a glimpse of ordinary, day to day life. Further context is provided by an aerial view of Diepsloot, a settlement of shacks north of Johannesburg, near the wealthy suburb of Dainfern. This series, which Hugo created over eight years, laments the legacy of colonialism and apartheid seen in the segregation of townships and cities and people and relationships. It isn't clear, for the most part, how, or whether, many of the subjects are related to each other: but this body of work would seem to suggest that their specific relationships are less important than their shared humanity.

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34 The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Won't Want to Miss by AiA Staff 09/15/11 With an ever-growing number of galleries scattered around New York, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Where to begin? Here at A.i.A., we are always on the hunt for clever, memorable shows that stand out in a crowded field. Pieter Hugo: Untitled, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2010, digital C-print, 68 inches square. Courtesy Yossi Milo Pieter Hugo at Yossi Milo, through Oct. 29 For his latest series, South African photographer Pieter Hugo traveled to Agbogbloshie, a techno-waste site outside of Accra, Ghana, to document the people, mostly young men, who scavenge for bits of resalable metals. The ruined landscape, dotted with plumes of smoke, coils of burning wires and face-down monitors, looks truly post-apocalyptic.

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38 The photographer Pieter Hugo is no stranger to shocking and peculiar sights. His horrifying, arresting 2007 portrait series The Hyena & Other Men showcased Nigerian street performers posing alongside their exotic prey. In Nollywood, his latest body of work, currently on view at the Yossi Milo Gallery, Hugo once again focuses his camera on performers, only this time his subjects are actors from Nigeria s surprisingly robust film industry, which is apparently the third largest in the world. The photographs don t allude to any films in particular, but rather explore some of the industry s more popular themes, like mysticism, war and the supernatural. The results are often menacing if not grotesque, and they blur the line between documentary and fiction. In one photo, a trio of zombielike children await their next cue, and, in another a welldressed man proudly stands, camera ready, holding the entrails of a slain ox. Nollywood is on view through April 17.

39 March 23, 2010 Pieter Hugo, Omo Omeonu, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008, color photograph, 68 x 68". From the series Nollywood, Taking pictures in Nigeria is a tricky business: Between a public savvy about the monetary value of commercial photography and a police force leery of external documentarians, one can spend weeks in Lagos or Abuja and come up short. This is not the case for artist Pieter Hugo, whose previous work offers thematic investigations of the quotidian and extraordinary in this vibrant but poorly understood region. The photographs on display in Nollywood, his latest exhibition, recall film stills but are neither narrative nor cinematic. Instead, these works offer carefully staged portraits of familiar archetypes and tropes within the entertainment industry, and all were shot in the southeastern Igbo city of Enugu. Hugo focuses on mundane buildings, streetscapes, and minor dramas fused with local iconography, including ghosts and witches or Yoruba deities. With its mash-up of digital technology and the cheek-by-jowl cosmopolitan anachronism of the city, Nollywood is a thoroughly idiosyncratic and twenty-first-century form. One will find, then, a double dose of representation: Hugo framing and picturing his actors with the help of a noted local production designer, and the actors in turn creating a mediated, ambiguously documentary vision of the megastate. While the individual characters that inhabit these pictures from a curvaceous sailor to a sword-wielding little person are front and center, the real treat is the assemblage of smaller details, such as a hand-scrawled billboard, the juxtaposition of equatorial jungle and dilapidated walk-up apartments, and battered oil drums, which give texture to the bewildering landscape that is Nollywood s stage. - Ian Bourland

40 Imagine a tall, blond man who could have been cast as Siegfried in Wagner s opera walking through the streets of a Nigerian village with a camera. He draws immediate attention to himself, and must feel like an alien. In Pieter Hugo s remarkable pictures of the hyena men travelling Hausa performers with their animals his subjects appear to be strange creatures, emissaries from the periphery of society. They create a spectacle in the places they visit.

41 I think Hugo s ability to connect with these animal wranglers, initiated by their mutual strangeness and curiosity, allowed him to make these portraits as startling as they are. At first the pictures struck me as merely spectacular. Looking at them more carefully, they pulled me in and forced me to think about the relationships within each group, their animals, their surroundings, their daily lives, and, finally, African society in general. Hugo is South African, and his subject is Africa. He started out as a photojournalist and with each project has pushed himself further into new territory. For another series, Hugo became fascinated by the gaudy world of the Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood. But instead of documenting what he saw, he decided to collaborate with Nigerian actors, models, and a makeup artist, using props, film sets, or natural settings to create a series of fictional portraits. The results are provocative, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking. In some cases, the actors incorporated post-colonial clichés into their own tableaus, thereby creating subversive self-representations with Hugo as the instigator and documentarian. This, to me, is what makes these pictures so remarkable. Hugo s photographs can be seen at Yossi Milo Gallery, in Chelsea, until April 10th. His books Nollywood and The Hyena & and Other Men are published by Prestel. Read more:

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44 There are plenty of cutesy, cheeky variations on "Hollywood" that refer to national and regional film industries Dhaliwood, Chollywood, Kollywood but Bollywood's the only one that's really made it into common parlance. Maybe it's time to add one to that list. In his striking series of color photographs, South African artist Pieter Hugo focuses on Nollywood: Nigeria's booming industry, that churns out a staggering 1,000 films per year. (Most go straight to video but still.) For his photographs, Hugo sets up his own "film stills" based on common themes in Nigerian cinema, resulting in sharp, strong images with narratives all their own. These are on view at Yossi Milo through April 10.

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