Archive: Issue No. 88, December 2004

Self-taught photographer Pieter Hugo is well-known and -regarded as a commercial photographer with an impeccable eye for aesthetics. But he's not just a magazine contributor; he works as a camera-for-hire with organisations that allow him to indulge his fascination with displaced, marginalised, obviously - but not always sadly - broken people (and, sometimes, places). He also has his own projects. At Michael Stevenson he shows three sets of work from the past two years.

The open face of Steven Mohapi looks out onto De Schmidt Street. He has a child's wide stare; beautiful big eyes, striped warm brown and green, like young acorns. His chubby cheeks are ashen.

Steven is one of the albinos Hugo has photographed across the world over the past two years, showing in the main part of the Michael Stevenson Gallery. Albinos lack melanin, 'a colouring agent that has gifted humanity with the notion of race', as Sean O'Toole puts it in the exhibition notes. This dead-pan presentation of albinos (the majority Black) ostensibly invites us to question our notion of race. Yet, albinos are a colour of their own, without the Caucasian flush that could have their skin registered as White. So yes, there is the initial discomfort of seeing African features molded in pale skin, but, as the two young racially white girls from England support, the fascination with albinos stems from the fact that they're... well, freaks (or as the ever-measured O'Toole puts it: 'a fragile community whose only difference derives from a slight of genetics.')

Which is why Hugo's composition is so sound: the majority of the large format 'Albino' portraits are taken ID-style, with the subject's face dead centre against a white background, eyes looking straight you. Initially you feel confronted. When does an albino look you in the eyes on the street? But, as you confront them back, you realise - when do I? Why can't we look freaks in the eyes?

And then, their gazes - so open, so full of self - begin to look like an invitation. Many are still unsettling - albinism often causes problems with the eyes and many of the portraits show this distinctly - but the revulsion/attraction finally stills to a quiet 'okay'. Of course, the stares are ingeniously blank, allowing your projection to rest at any point on the scale. As O'Toole, rather more eloquently, puts it: 'At stake here is our ability to look beyond emptiness and the void, to see meaning defined by a new fullness - of humanity, of being.'

It's a testament to the complexity of the subject that there is one portrait that doesn't gaze back. Danielle Lawrence's eyes look up and slightly to one side. Her genetics taking her skin beyond the pale, we can see her blue veins glistening at her temple and throat. This young girl looks - beautifically - on the point of death, or of ascension. She is remarkably mortal, but veiled by magic: just as the Shona believe albinos to be.

In the adjoining gallery, we see death. Or, rather, the memory of death. Hugo has documented the sites of genocides that happened a decade ago in Rwanda. Four photographs of bodies preserved with lime (they look like either ghosts or statues, not like flesh, not human) are grotesque.

On the opposite wall are four more subtly disturbing photographs. They look like simple forest studies. There is one sun-dappled glade in particular that has the hazy beauty of a photograph shot for an inspirational calendar. These are all sites of mass graves. There is nothing horrifying about these spaces; until you read the label. Irrationally, one finds it surprising that these places aren't obviously gravesites. After all, it's how, not where, people die that's harrowing.

Except when the space is not ideologically neutral: Another photograph shows a rubble-strewn church. A simple frieze depicting important events in Jesus' life marches across the wall. On the altar someone has placed a human skull (a joke?). Closer inspection of the rubble shows that bones are mixed in there.

Hugo has taken a closer look at the rubble of this, the Ntarama Catholic Church, where hundreds of people were murdered as they took shelter. It's a dispassionate gaze, the eye darting to calculate the composition. It invites a dispassionate gaze. The curve of the toe of a single smart men's shoe is sensuously mirrored by a disjointed lower jaw bone. A peachy-orange rosary glows luminously from the debris; a pink-orange comb - only two teeth broken - shines as brightly in another print. What do these cold, grubby objects tell us? That the people who died shined their shoes and prayed and combed their hair.

In the front room of the gallery is a small collection of prints that are life-affirming. They document a guardian care programme at a TB hospital in Malawi. Patients are nursed by their carers, who are family or friends. The patients seem to be doing well. The startling stare of Tabalure Chitope, in particular, dares the viewer to dismiss her as ill.

There are three more sets of eyes at the entrance to the gallery. These eyes are blind, filled with mud. They are barbershop signs (paintings of the latest hairstyles on walls) defaced by Hutu militia. The Hutu militia gouged out the eyes of murals. Was it a message? Was it pure, irrational hatred? Or was it a reaction to eyes that return their gaze; a reaction to being confronted?

Closed: November 28

Michelle Matthews is a seasoned but youthful journalist who is currently Publishing Manager of the Oshun Books imprint of Struik.