Gallery of Photography, Temple Bar | Until Sunday 21 August 2016

Thirteen Works offers us a cross section of the oeuvre of internationally acclaimed South African photographer Pieter Hugo, whose work synthesises documentary with visual narrative. A compilation of images from three of his most striking series makes for a provocative collection that forces us to confront the political issues inherent to race relations and the crisis of photographic representation in post-colonial Africa. The images themselves are beautifully haunting, resonating with a lingering power that teeters on a disturbing edge. These effects are fitting with Hugo’s fascination with social peripheries and those who occupy the margins of society.

Permanent Error (2009-10) investigates the subjects who roam across Ghana’s digital dumping ground, a barren stretch of toxic wasteland known as Agbogbloshie, revealing the resilience of its workers. They return our gaze with a quiet strength and confidence, and their bovine companions are dignified in their docility. The subjects’ tenacity is striking against the backdrop of smoke-filled mountains of flaming motherboards, a result of the global shipping of millions of tonnes of digital refuse. Works from The Hyena and Other Men (2005-07) portray nomadic medicine-men who make a living by performing for crowds with hyenas, baboons and rock pythons. Thematic lines are blurred between wildness and domesticity, tradition and modernity. The subjects confront us with their piercing gazes, reminding us that their agency in constructing the image is very much a definitive feature of the works. In this sense, the dichotomy between subject and object is diffused, which makes us question the nature of authorship. In excerpts from Nollywood (2008), Hugo and his collaborators recreate the eclectic and eventful world of the Nigerian film industry, the third largest in the world. Garish and theatrical aesthetics accompany storylines of comedy, witchcraft, romance and sex work.

The images are at odds with the dominant Western narrative of victimhood that is so often attributed to African inhabitants; a discursively colonising tool that serves to homogenise and subdue the population and strip them of agency, leaving them at the mercy of development agencies that aim to profit from Africa’s “lack” of Western lifestyle. Hugo’s works exemplify a resistance to this tool of neo-colonialism, and to see the subjects’ statuesque gazes as expressing a sense of hopelessness is a reading that is almost too easy. Yet equally so is to read Hugo’s work as devoid of any inkling of colonial relations. Indeed, as someone who describes himself as “colonial driftwood”, Hugo is aware of the problematic nature of being the actor behind the lens, and has described himself as “[having] a deep suspicion of photography, to the point where I do sometimes think it cannot accurately portray anything…I’ve travelled through Africa, I know it, but at the same time I’m not really part of it… I can’t claim to [have] an authentic voice, but I can claim to have an honest one.”

Many critics feel that, given Hugo’s social positioning as a white South African and the epistemologies that this entails, the foundation of his work is exploiting those on the margins, exotifying the “other” for the visual consumption and gratification of the Western art market. Positioning humans and beasts together in an African landscape enters the volatile territory of tired old racial stereotypes which are embedded in a wider social context of racial disparity. Hugo’s consciousness of his positioning and the nature of cultural representation in such a context strives to confront these problems in his work. Yet confrontation is not subversion. Does a simple comment on his awareness serve to alleviate him from the political consequences of his work? To what extent should one man take responsibility for history? Or must we consider that Hugo’s images are reproducing the disparate colonial power relations of white photographer as auteur, constructing a subjecthood for his collaborators? Hugo claims that his intentions are in no way malignant and that his work is actually a comment on Western representational clichés of Africa. Yet fair intentions do not equal fair consequences, and hegemony’s grip is insidious. Even Hugo’s ability to construct images at will and display them to Western audiences whilst his subjects scavenge through Agbobloshie is troubling.

Yet theory and criticism also serve as discursive tools of subject construction, and if we are to read Hugo’s work as just another tool of visual colonialism, we too are falling prey to a narrative that victimises his subjects. What is reassuring about Thirteen Works is the critical distance that the photographer takes. By inhabiting such a space, Hugo’s work becomes a reflexive, almost comedic commentary on the nature of visual representation as well as social identity and its responsibilities. We can never speak for others, and Hugo’s work serves to generate a dialogue and make us think about the nature of such contentions, which is arguably the hallmark of a powerful artistic insight.