Pieter Hugo - 1994 (MINT CONDITION, SHRINK-WRAPPED) - 2017

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Esta es la edición más reciente de la SUPER POPULAR SUBASTA DE UN SOLO VENDEDOR por 5Uhr30.com (Ecki Heuser, Colonia, Alemania).
Presentando una selección personal de mejores obras de FOTOLIBROS INTERNACIONALES de mi COLECCIÓN PRIVADA y de ADQUISICIONES RECIENTES.

GRAN OPORTUNIDAD para adquirir este maravilloso libro de Pieter Hugo, conocido por "The Hyena and Other Men" (Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook. A History) - en CONDICIÓN NUEVA.

Nuevo, en perfecto estado, sin leer; aún conservando la envoltura original del editor.
EDICIÓN DE COLECCIONISTA.

"Pieter Hugo (nacido en 1976 en Johannesburgo) es un artista fotográfico que vive en Ciudad del Cabo.
Importantes exposiciones individuales en museos se han llevado a cabo en Museu Coleção Berardo; el Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; el Museo de Fotografía de La Haya, el Musée de l'Elysée en Lausana, el Ludwig Museum en Budapest, Fotografiska en Estocolmo, MAXXI en Roma y el Institute of Modern Art en Brisbane, entre otros. Hugo ha participado en numerosas exposiciones colectivas en instituciones como el National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art en Seúl, Barbican Art Gallery, Tate Modern, el Folkwang Museum, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, y la Bienal de São Paulo.
Su obra está representada en colecciones públicas y privadas prominentes, entre ellas Centre Pompidou, Rijksmuseum, el Museum of Modern Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum y Huis Marseille.
Pieter Hugo recibió el Discovery Award en el festival Rencontres d'Arles y el KLM Paul Huf Award en 2008, el Seydou Keita Award en Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial en 2011, y fue preseleccionado para el Deutsche Börse Photography Prize en 2012. En 2015 fue preseleccionado para el Prix Pictet y fue elegido como artista ‘In Focus’ para el Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize en la National Portrait Gallery de Londres."
(website del artista)

“I happened to start the work in Rwanda but I’ve been thinking about the year 1994 in relation to both countries over a period of 10 or 20 years. I noticed how the kids, ­particularly in South Africa, don’t carry the same historical baggage as their parents. I find their engagement with the world to be very refreshing in that they are not burdened by the past, but at the same time you witness them growing up with these liberation narratives that are in some ways fabrications. It’s like you know something they don’t know about the potential failure or shortcomings of these narratives …
Most of the images were taken in villages around Rwanda and South Africa. There’s a thin line between nature being seen as idyllic and as a place where terrible things happen – permeated by genocide, a constantly contested space. Seen as a metaphor, it’s as if the further you leave the city and its systems of control, the more primal things become. At times the children appear conservative, existing in an orderly world; at other times there’s something feral about them, as in Lord of the Flies, a place devoid of rules. This is most noticeable in the Rwanda images where clothes donated from Europe, with particular cultural significations, are transposed into a completely different context.
Being a parent myself has shifted my way of looking at kids dramatically, so there is the challenge of photographing children unsentimentally. The act of photographing a child is so different – and in many ways more difficult – to making a portrait of an adult. The normal power dynamics between photographer and subject are subtly shifted. I searched for children who seemed already to have fully formed personalities. There is an honesty and a forthrightness which cannot otherwise be evoked."
(website Pieter Hugo)

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Prestel, 2017. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover with dustjacket. 240 x 285 mm. 92 pages. 50 photos. Photos: Pieter Hugo. Language: English.

Great Pieter Hugo publication - in perfect condition.

GIANTS
Ashraf Jamal

I.
In Boyhood, JM Coetzee recalls a childhood at odds with the Arcadian fantasy peddled in the Children’s Encyclopaedia, ‘a time of innocent joy, to be spent in the meadows amid buttercups and bunny-rabbits or at the hearthside absorbed in a storybook’. This ‘is a vision of childhood utterly alien to him’, he bemoans, for ‘nothing he experiences … at home or at school, leads him to think that childhood is anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring’.

Coetzee has been gritting his teeth ever since, the source of his disaffection ressentiment, by its very nature an ungenerous default position that disconnects rather than connects. That Coetzee has persuaded us of the veracity of this perspective – he is widely regarded as ‘our best authority on suffering’ – has everything to do with the pathological nature of his optic. However, if this extract from Boyhood corroborates the prevailing view of the home and the school as sites for the indoctrination, oppression and control of the child, then Pieter Hugo’s photographs of children refuse such a dangerously fluent conflation. What follows is an elaboration on this wager.

In his introduction to White Writing Coetzee underscored the exilic dread of his ‘non-position’ by announcing a fraught hiatus in the white colonial imagination: no longer European, not yet African. This hiatus, this unsettled non-position, has also profoundly shaped Hugo. My view, however, is that in Hugo’s case, unsettlement – belonging yet not belonging – has fostered a very different optic. At no point in his career has the photographer allowed himself the privilege of assuming an authoritative and detached position. Rather, his psychic and exilic unsettlement – his grasp of power and powerlessness – has generated a very different method and means of understanding and seeing the world.

It is of course true that Hugo is in the grip of the panoptic machinery of the camera, what he must, perforce, produce its preternatural vice – reflect the light that bounces off objects, fix his subject in a viewfinder, hold fast the indelible moment. And yet something other also comes into play and that is the very being of the photographer himself.

In our conversation Hugo, who is commonly mistaken as a documentary photographer, is quick to point out the blur ‘between documentary and photography-as-art’ traditions. This blur, or merger, a constitutive facet of all Hugo’s work, is not only a rejoinder against the perception of a photograph-as-a-fact but a desire to affirm a photograph’s ‘constructed side’. Hugo does not shirk artifice in the making of a photograph. That he chooses, contra David Goldblatt, to omit all captions from his photographs of children, be it their names, age or location, has everything to do with his desire to suspend the fetish of fact.

By eschewing commentary Hugo asserts his inextricability from the moment of taking a photograph. ‘One cannot separate who is taking a picture of what,’ he says. ‘I am who I am in this dynamic.’ Here Hugo is telling us that he is someone who has fused with the moment. As a ‘White African’ – Hugo’s self-designation – it is the splice of seemingly in-different worlds – the photographer and the photographed – which gives the photographs their enabling potency. His children are never merely the objects of a vision but creatures re-envisioned in the ‘dynamic’ of making a moment.

My conversation with Hugo was spurred by the photographer’s express need to speak of Rwanda, a country whose genocidal history and fraught democracy he has covered for fifteen years.His Rwandan photographs, which have largely focused on mass grave sites grown ‘derelict’, ‘exhumed’, ‘re-designated’, are in many ways a record of the economy of death, an economy for which the medium of photography has typically operated as a surrogate and handmaiden. However, Hugo’s Rwandan ‘landscape’ cannot or will not be easily packaged or contained. How then is the photographer to see that landscape in which life and death remain snagged, in which one cannot coolly state, after Nietzsche, that the dead far outnumber the living, and thereby allow Thanatos to reign supreme?

Hugo, by way of an answer, chooses to turn his attention to a young girl, dressed for a playacted ‘wedding’, and alights upon his first image for his series on Rwandan and South African children. We see the child, veiled, barely visible, yet enveloped in a world as real as it is fantastical. At no point does one sense the intrusiveness of the camera even though it is everywhere in the framing. There is no obvious lesson here and hence no need to provide name, location, age. For what draws the photographer is the very dream world which Coetzee deemed impertinent, a world which Hugo names ‘Arcadian’.

It is this twofold vision of Thanatos and Arcadia, death and life, nullity and futurity, which allows Hugo to step away from the numbing, unnumbered, unending wasteland of the dead, the better to exhume or restore life to a nation paranoid, somnambulistic, possessed by its own extinction. For what has compelled Hugo on his last two outings to Rwanda is the photographer’s desire in the very grip of death to find the ‘unfulfilled promise’ of Arcadia.

That Hugo would find the echo of this ‘unfulfilled promise’ in his homeland would all the more deepen his sense of disconnection and frustration with the world. That said, Hugo is no misanthrope – even though he is commonly perceived as such by those who regard his optic as invasive, exploitative, even pornographic. The root of this common misprision lies in what Coetzee in Disgrace describes as ‘moral prurience’, a censorious moral filter in and through which the world must be ceaselessly moderated. Why, Hugo wonders, must photography be ‘humanistic’? ‘Since when did art stop being provocative?’

It would be an error, however, to assume that Hugo is solely preoccupied by provocation. Indeed, after Nietzsche, I find his images to be human, all too human. Because his subjects are not framed by a prescriptive or projected value, they are never intended as representational or ideological embodiments. Rather, it is the singularity of the being of the subject, dynamically fused with the photographer’s being, which returns image-making to its mortal coil. Hugo’s South African children, his own and those of his friends – unjustly countered against his Rwandan image-repertoire as softer in focus, more indulgent, even decadent – reaffirm the unsettlement at the core of his vision.

Knowing Rwanda’s genocidal history, and Hugo’s desire in the midst of that economy of death to find some release, surely means that his Rwandan image-repertoire must be the more attenuated. To simply ascribe a pathological optic to the artist, to assume that he is merely trafficking in the seduction of Africa’s horror story, is to grossly simplify the aggravated crux which generated his vision of Rwandan children. True they are battle-worn, true they seem caught between worlds, one dead and dying, the other powerless to be born, and yet, while caught in this suspended and aggravated moment, Hugo finds a way towards Arcadia.

II.
‘Your children are not your children,’ Kahlil Gibran declares in The Prophet. ‘They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.’ And yet, despite this simple and indisputable wisdom, we find children bartered, treated as property in a genealogical fantasy. As the adage goes, ‘children are our future’.

This paradoxical damnation of children and their exploitation as a trope for futurity reaffirms the insidious nature of adult authority. Dr Seuss, that great fantasist, is thoroughly justified when he notes that ‘Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them’. But in a world controlled by adults, a world in which, after Coetzee, childhood is ‘a time of gritting the teeth and enduring’ the better to reproduce the sins of the Father and Mother, such an Arcadian freedom, such revolutionary liberty, is barely countenanced, the child in the circuitry of human exchange rendered forever the surrogate, adjunct, oracle, boon and curse of the adult.

Turning then to that corrosive clich – ‘the child should be seen but not heard’ – one finds oneself trapped in a seemingly hopeless system in which children remain the victims of power, indentured labour and sexual slavery, among a host of abuses. Like all clichés this one speaks the unspeakable – that children must not and cannot be heard for fear that they will reveal the perversity of our familial, educative, global-corporate core in which children, in one way or another, are systemically wronged. Better, then, that they be seen and not heard.

In the light of this oppressive silence perhaps photography, an optic that can further fix a child, objectify him or her, might be yet another means through which their presence can be controlled. This certainly seems to be the prevailing view. It is as if children cannot or must not be photographed precisely because the medium of photography – appropriative by its very nature – might reveal the dark truth about the powerlessness of children and the root of their abuse.

It is as if the Arcadia which children occupy is one which the adult world must disavow and shatter, be it out of envy, hate or despair, because of its own exile from that world. Tom Stoppard underscores this perversity by noting the erroneous and dangerous assumption that ‘Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up.’ The root of this error in judgment stems from our inability to imagine a childhood freed from the curse of time and history. And yet, as Stoppard adds, ‘A child’s purpose is to be a child.’

It is the very being of children which we, the aged, have forgotten, or refuse to recall. And yet, despite this perverse resistance, still we must make of children the adjuncts and avatars of a fantasy of some lost world. Which is why we have the ‘Lost Boys’ and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in which every adult self-hatred and violent fantasy must be re-enacted the better to see the boy as the mirror of the man. Today’s child soldiers are the monstrous fulfilment of this fatal circuitry of knowledge, belief and experience, in which the child becomes nothing more than a commodity, a vehicle and agent, a creature upon whom a psychic violence must perforce be executed, because within this fatalistic realm there is no childhood immune to the sullied hands of men and women.

It is curious therefore that, while societies worldwide uniformly abuse the rights and freedoms of children, it is children, or rather the idea of childhood, that emerges as the ultimate fetish and fantasy of liberation for the aged. If ‘youth’ is routinely abused, it is as routinely exalted and enshrined. Emblematic of that most avidly sought-after elixir – the ‘lost horizon’ of eternal youth – children are reminders of our lost past, our supposed innocence, which is why they are despised all the more, and why we, the aged despisers of the free will of children, inaccurately declare that ‘youth is wasted on the young’.

Dadas estas circunstancias de celebración y opresión sin alma de los niños en sociedades de todo el mundo, ¿qué debemos entender de la lectura fotográfica de Hugo sobre un grupo de niños de Sudáfrica y Ruanda, porque, por supuesto, ninguna fotografía es inocente, y tampoco lo es su sujeto?

La fortaleza de Hugo reside en su debilidad: se niega a controlar plenamente el sujeto visto, eligiendo una ‘dinámica’ intercomunicativa. Es importante señalar que este proceso no es simplemente un ejercicio de compasión. Hugo no restituye el principio central de Martin Buber – un sobreviviente de las “fábricas de asesinato” de Europa – que en Yo y Tú señala: “Me imagino a mí mismo lo que otro hombre desea, siente, percibe, piensa en este mismo momento, y no como un contenido separado, sino en su propia realidad, es decir, como un proceso vivo en este hombre.” Más bien, para explicar cómo ocurre el intercambio, cuando qué es lo que Hugo busca traer a la acción, permítanme volver a mi primer encuentro con sus fotografías de niños.

III.
En el contexto de la galería los niños aparecen a una escala humana, nos acompañan y nos miran mientras absorbemos silenciosamente su presencia. Porque, por supuesto, las galerías son santuarios, zonas de silencio donde lo sagrado y lo profano se entrelazan. De hecho, la experiencia de la galería, con su énfasis convencional en el silencio y la visibilidad, reproduce la ecuación tóxica típicamente asociada a los niños. Sin embargo, tal visión punitiva no fue otorgada por la propia experiencia, pues nunca fue la intención de Hugo sanctificar el fetichismo de mirar o consagrar la imagen como un objeto silencioso de intercambio. Más bien, como si deseara lo opuesto de una cultura que busca abreviar, abreviar y vaciar el momento de intercambio entre el espectador y lo visto, Hugo buscó abrir y airear el momento de la percepción.

Una vez más me impresionó el hecho de que las fotografías están puestas en escena, preparadas, porque para mí este ha sido siempre el momento definitorio de experimentar una fotografía de Hugo. Y si este encuadre autorreflexivo ha probado ser un punto de apoyo para toda la obra del fotógrafo, es porque Hugo siempre ha percibido su propia vida como puesta en escena – una posición entre posiciones, auténtica pero no, europea pero africana, documentada pero artística, dentro y fuera del lugar.

Es esta disonancia, este fallo, que también habita los momentos que captura, porque se nota en los niños de Hugo no solo las posturas, o poses, algunas torpes, como si el niño fuera reacomodado como cualquier otro prothesismo, sino también la ropa que los cubre que, a la vista, sugiere el vestirse para la ocasión. Una niña ruandesa se reclina sobre un escarpe de suelo rojo-marrón en un mini-vestido de lentejuelas doradas; una niña sudafricana rubia, pálida, está sentada en un bosque vestida con un deslizamiento de época de los años 20. Cuando pregunto a Hugo sobre esta coreografía, me devuelve a su gusto duradero por una imagen que muestre cierta conciencia de su naturaleza construída.

Hay una sorpresa adicional, pues la ropa con la que viste a sus niños ruandeses – “prendas desproporcionadas, donadas por Escandinavia” – ramifica el pliegue del centro y la periferia, Norte y Sur. No son proyecciones claramente politizadas de un conflicto hemisférico. Los niños no son claves ni son figuras empáticas para alguna paridad global. Más bien, el hecho de que estemos tratando con niños – aunque silenciados e inmortalizados – permanece en primer plano en el proceso de visión.

La precoz permea cada una de las fotografías de Hugo. Esta precoz o autoconocimiento no es resultado del dicho de que “uno es más sabio que sus años.” En verdad, lo último que a Hugo le interesa es alimentar nuestra relación perversa con la juventud, nuestro deseo de destruirla o idealizarla. A pesar de que ha compuesto, diseñado, iluminado a sus sujetos, no son objetos fetichistas ni himnos triviales a la belleza. Más bien cada sujeto late, fija nuestra mirada, perturba nuestra compostura. Que lo hagan sin agresión, sin imponer una demanda moral sobre nosotros, sin activar nuestra culpa, revela el poder de las imágenes de Hugo – son, sobre todo, extramoral, ocupando un espacio fuera del sombrío circuito de la economía explotadora de la juventud.

Un niño moreno, sin camisa, con pantalón corto, se relaja en la orilla de un arroyo del bosque, con una mano apoyada en la cintura, la otra sumergida en el espumeante torrente. La mirada es directa, los labios entreabiertos brillan a la luz moteada. Me recuerda a la odalisca clásica, la desnuda reclining, de siglos de posturas, de seducción. Otro niño, rubio, se agacha, con los pies descalzos clavados a una roca; sus ojos, rojos, miran fijamente, una torpe sonrisa rasgada cruza sus labios. Es la auto-presencia de este niño lo que une a uno, el gran alcance de su yo, su niñez, y el suelo africano que la ha engendrado. Porque estas son imágenes de niños africanos. Estos son los gigantes que Ingrid Jonker soñó en su poema “El niño que fue abatido por los soldados en Nyanga”, al que Nelson Mandela rindió homenaje en su discurso de inauguración en 1994.

El niño no está muerto
El niño levanta los puños contra su madre
Que grita África grita el olor
De la libertad y de la brea
En las ubicaciones del corazón sitiado

El niño levanta los puños contra su padre
En la marcha de las generaciones
Que gritan África contra el olor
De la justicia y la sangre
En las calles de su orgullo armado

El niño no está muerto
Ni en Langa ni en Nyanga
Ni en Orlando ni en Sharpeville
Ni en la comisaría de Philippi
Donde yace con una bala en la cabeza

El niño es la sombra de los soldados
En guardia con armas, saracenas y porras
El niño está presente en todas las reuniones y legislaciones
El niño escurre su mirada por las ventanas de las casas y hacia los corazones de las madres
El niño que solo quería jugar al sol en Nyanga está en todas partes
El niño que se convirtió en hombre recorre toda África
El niño que se convirtió en gigante viaja por todo el mundo

Sin un pase

(extraído del sitio web de Pieter Hugo)