The Challenge of Reality in Pieter Hugo’s Photography

This essay critically interrogates the disturbing ‘nature’ of Pieter Hugo’s works, by attempting to go beyond their cursory views to read other meanings into these visual presentations and at the same time try to situate them within the bounds of both art and social documentary photography. Through this enquiry, the artist is presented as one who is involved in a social crusade which is manifested in his obvious attempt to unveil inequality in human existence and perhaps society’s cold indifference to the plight of the less privileged thereby presenting Hugo as an artist and social documentary photographer. This essay attempts to posit that “the condemnation of images on the basis of formal artistic properties”1 may be merely simplistic; and that “representations are not objective nor are the meanings of images… encoded in, or intrinsic to, the photographs, the type or format of the cameras, even subjects, but are instead shaped by the visual tropes of the culture that views the images.”2 The claims to authenticity and truth are also part of other meanings this essay wishes to read into Hugo’s photographs.