DATE: December 28, 2007
Pieter Hugo
The Hyena Men of Abuja, Nigeria, 2005
Digital C Print
© Pieter Hugo, Courtesy Yossi Milo GalleryMembers of one extended family, the Hyena Men roam about with their retinue of hyenas, baboons and big snakes attracting astonished crowds. They dance and perform tricks with their animals, and spectators shower them with money. They also sell herbal medicines.
Set in dusty streets strewn with trash and automotive wreckage and with low hardscrabble buildings in the background, Mr. Hugo's superlucid, slightly bleached images are otherworldly and grittily real, as though they were from some postapocalyptic future. Each five-by-five-foot picture shows a group member with a baboon or a hyena on a leash and a stick at hand in case the animal gets too frisky. There is also a group portrait of seven men, eight animals and a little girl who sits familiarly on one hyena's back.
Moral questions arise. Do Mr. Hugo's pictures exoticize "the other?" Do they condone the mistreatment of animals? It is partly that disquieting feeling of flirting with the forbidden that makes these photographs so hard to look away from.
From The New York Times
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Review: Pieter Hugo's The Hyena and Other Men at Yossi Milo Gallery
When I came across, in a recent art magazine, Pieter Hugo's photograph of a muscular African man in a tank top and a raggedy skirt of cloth and leather holding a muzzled hyena by a heavy chain, I thought it had to be a digitally synthesized image. It's not. It's from a series of portraits the Johannesburg-based Mr. Hugo made while traveling in Nigeria with a group of entertainers and animal handlers known as the Hyena Men.
Pieter Hugo
The Hyena Men of Abuja, Nigeria, 2005
Digital C Print
© Pieter Hugo, Courtesy Yossi Milo GallerySet in dusty streets strewn with trash and automotive wreckage and with low hardscrabble buildings in the background, Mr. Hugo's superlucid, slightly bleached images are otherworldly and grittily real, as though they were from some postapocalyptic future. Each five-by-five-foot picture shows a group member with a baboon or a hyena on a leash and a stick at hand in case the animal gets too frisky. There is also a group portrait of seven men, eight animals and a little girl who sits familiarly on one hyena's back.
Moral questions arise. Do Mr. Hugo's pictures exoticize "the other?" Do they condone the mistreatment of animals? It is partly that disquieting feeling of flirting with the forbidden that makes these photographs so hard to look away from.
From The New York Times
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