Les Rencontres d'Arles Rencontres d'Arles: expositions, stages photo /exhibitions, photo workshops.

Hugo created the series, The Hyena and Other Men, while travelling in Nigeria with a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of tenuously domesticated hyenas, monkeys and snakes. The portraits feature groupings of man and animal surrounded by the barren urban centers of Nigeria. Captured during quiet moments between the spectacle of street performances, the photographs possess a stillness that subverts the tense physicality of animals and their trainers. Indeed, the complexity of the animal-trainer relationships - nuanced with struggles of power, ownership and affection - is fully at the surface of the work.

WILD HONEY COLLECTORS

The Wild Honey Collectors series emerged from a period Pieter Hugo spent with a collective of workers in the forests of Ghana. Enshrined in cassava branches and plastic to protect themselves from stings, the men go about the process of smoking out the bees in order to leave the honey unattended. In these portraits, the costumed figures amid the lushness of the forests possess a theatricality that exotically distracts from the exigency of their pursuit.

www.pieterhugo.com

Pieter Hugo

Born in 1976 in South Africa. Lives and works in South Africa.

Pieter Hugo has produced three monographs: Looking Aside (2006), Messina/Musina (2007) and The Hyena & Other Men (2007).

Upcoming solo exhibitions are with Yossi Milo Gallery in New York and Gallery Extraspazio in Rome in November 2007. Recent group exhibitions include Reality Check: Contemporary art photography from South Africa 2007 at Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen, travelling to Museum and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; An Atlas of Events at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2007); Faccia A Faccia: Il nouvo ritratto fotografico at FORMA, Centro Internazionale di Fotografia, Milan (2007); the 27th São Paulo Bienal (2006); and Street: Behind the cliché at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2006). He was included on ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow (Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, and Aperture, New York), an exhibition identifying 50 young photographers who will be considered great by 2025, accompanied by a book published by Thames & Hudson. He won first prize in the Portraits section of the 2006 World Press Photo competition, and was selected as the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2007, with an exhibition touring South Africa until July 2008.

He is represented by the Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

EXHIBITIONS