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Sebastian Hau

I first became aware of Nigeria's remarkable film industry while working on the series The Hyena & Other Men. Everywhere I traveled, out of the corner of my eye, I'd see people watching these locally produced films—in bars, hotel lobbies, anywhere there was a television. The production values ​​back then were really low, especially the sound quality, which is perhaps why the films irritated me so much at first. But then, at some point, I became more interested in the industry itself, which is the third largest in the world after the United States and India. It wasn't the economics of releasing 500 to 1,000 films each year that interested me as much as the cultural issues encoded in a cinema made by local producers for local audiences. Here we have a local entertainment industry that enables mass self-representation through popular culture. I don't want to exaggerate: the Nigerian film industry diligently produces a mix of banal, strange, interesting, and occasionally profound films. What intrigued me was the authenticity at stake and, if you think about it a little more, how this exercise in authenticity challenges Western preconceived ideas about Africa.
With these grand ideas in mind, I began photographing on film sets. It was an unproductive avenue. I wasn't interested in making a documentary project that would show the puppet strings: the movie cameras, the booms, the microphones, and the countless operators behind the scenes. I was more interested in the cinematic ideas and stereotypes being manufactured for mass consumption. One night, I met a makeup artist who showed me his portfolio: photographs of actors in makeup. He worked in Enugu, which is much easier to work with than Lagos, and he had many connections. We reached an agreement whereby he would help me on my portrait series; the collaboration would showcase his skills with makeup and costumes as much as mine with the camera.The portraits were made over four trips. The individual shoots weren't formal events on a film set; I prefer to think of them as theatrical happenings that sometimes came together quite informally. Of course, I directed the final compositions; they weren't spontaneous events as such. I think it's important to recognize that my photographs offer a selective engagement with the ideas and visual culture of Nollywood. I chose not to involve myself in the soap opera genre, which is very popular in Nigeria and generally set in upper-class homes. I had no interest in that. My taste is more toward the macabre; I loved horror movies as a kid. There's still an element of that in the subterranean parts of my mind.The project's arc involved imagining a series of portraits, inventing them with actors, and then documenting these fictional subjects. In my development as an artist, this project was the first time I truly questioned the veracity of portraiture. I realized how portraiture can be played with, that it can be so much more than just the surface-level depiction of a subject. For example, the portrait of the three enslaved women is easy to misinterpret. But, in fact, it's a photograph of three paid actors dressed in costumes and chains. Working on this series and then reading the responses, I became more aware of what the viewer brings to the image, which often exceeds what is depicted.

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Pieter Hugo - Nollywood - 2009

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This object is no longer available, but there’s still lots to explore

Pieter Hugo - Nollywood - 2009

Popular in Art & Photography Books

1384 objects

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