Photographic portraits of people in marginalised communities in Africa comprise Pieter Hugo’s powerful bodies of work. His landmark series, The Hyena and Other Men, was created while traveling in Nigeria (2005 and 2007) with a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of tenuously domesticated animals. The young salvagers in Ghana’s burning electronics dumps depicted in his Permanent Error series appear both apocalyptic yet somehow pastoral. 1994 consists of powerful portraits taken of children in Rwanda and in South Africa born after 1994, a date of historic significance in both countries.
Pieter Hugo’s works are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, among others. Monographs have been published of his series The Hyena and Other Men, Permanent Error, Nollywood, Looking Aside, Flat Noodle Soup, Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide, There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends, Kin and 1994.