Pieter Hugo: Nollywood
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
It’s like contemplating your death every day – looking to the negative to give more focus to what you have. In a bar during the Arles Photography Festival, Sean O’Hagan witnessed Pieter Hugo stating that the death of photography was imminent. I think it may be Kracauer’s fault.
(Image: Chris Nkulo and Patience Umeh, Enugu, Nigeria 2008 © Pieter
Hugo)Strangely Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and ideas relating to Doctor Zhivago have been going around in my head in relation to Hugo’s Nollywood. But what I’m really hooked up on is Hugo’s worrying statement that he has to consider “the impossibility of photography”. It surprises me even more as his Nollywood series appears to be a shift towards a new positivity – more later.
The Nigerian film industry, the third largest in the world, outsells the big Hollywood films in its home country. Nollywood films have to be sold fast at the market stalls before the pirate-copies take over. Their content is driven by customer demand – the result is easy to follow story lines, lots of violence and an interest in themes like voodoo and good battling with evil. Nollywood evokes a mix of pride and shame. Low budget and poorly edited (turn-around time is usually around 10 days) the films are watched addictively; Hugo noted how they permeate Nigerian society, and his interest grew. He tells of speakers hissing everywhere from police stations to restaurants while people watch them – the volume is always up loud.
To capture his striking Nollywood images Hugo used local models and Nollywood actors. His description of these works as theatrical happenings is wonderfully apt and sets the tone. They are partly composed and staged, however the unexpected plays a part. The props and figures might have changed to suit circumstance – this is Africa and things don’t always run like clockwork – and the location isn’t a stage set, and this brings its own variables.
Hugo has said, in reference to his Arles statement, that he can get carried away, but does question photography’s ability to truly portray anything. Hugo’s fear that photography is just a “glimpse” and incapable of a truthful portrayal probably stems back to Siegfried Kracauer and his “Photography” essay of 1927. For Kracauer photography can’t present authentic truth content – it isn’t a mediator of truth like Art – and he set photography on the opposing side of art and significance. Although important in showing nature devoid of symbolic and mythological meaning: a reality alienated from human thought, photography can’t capture the significance of individuals (as in portraiture) or history. This is because of its fixed rigidity to time and its conveyance of spatial continuum. Perhaps photography is flawed but Hugo’s work does convey some interesting information – truths even.
Looking at Hugo’s images my eye keeps being drawn to certain details. For example, in Malachy Udegbunam with children one child has a distended stomach and another appears to have rickets: signs of malnutrition. This reminded me of a conversation I had years ago while researching an early 16th century Flemish altarpiece. The lipstick in Doctor Zhivago gives it away Prof Aileen Ribeiro told me. They focussed on getting the bigger details authentic to the period, but the make-up tells us the truth and firmly dates the production.
The point is that it is extremely hard to detach a painting or any man-made object from the world that created it. It’s like a forensic investigation – it might look like nothing happened and be wiped clean – but clues remain. These children in the photograph are from a poor background that we’d struggle to find in our western society. A group of images gives us more to go on as we can draw on similarities to gather our conclusions. The Nollywood photographs are perhaps telling us more than at first glance. Kracauer’s cultural debris that photography records might hold its own truth-content.
The Jesus figure in Hugo’s Malachy Udegbunam with children looks very out of place and time to our eyes. Nollywood films explore issues such as diverse religious belief and organised religion in Nigeria, and magic which is still part of life for many in Africa. In many of his photographs, Hugo reflects Nollywood’s interest in zombies, demons and mummies. In Chris Nkulo and Patience Umeh, a demonic figure poses for his picture, while Patience sits beside him. But just look at that detail of her handbag – bringing the everyday into a surreal image. Hugo is obviously a man with a sense of humour. This is backed up by his self-portrait (in his underwear) in the series.
(Image: Malachy Udegbunam with children. Enugu , Nigeria 2008 © Pieter Hugo)
Images courtesy of Michael Stevenson, Cape Town and Yossi Milo, New York
Art is the means by which life reflects on, transforms and indeed creates its values; human life without it would not properly be human at all.
Antony Gormley