Pieter Hugo

I chose Pieter Hugo’s photography as when first viewing his photography I was attracted to the realistic view he brings to his photos. For example, he captures extremely raw photos of people in his home of Cape town in South Africa that evoke a lot of emotion in his viewers.

This photo taken by Hugo is extraordinarily impactful for his viewers. We get a close-up picture of a young child who is crouching infront of a burning wreckage. Hugo highlights the poverty and struggles of people in his country in this powerful photo. He zooms in on the subject to show his hopeless facial expression and the beads of sweat dripping down his face. The background is blurred so we can just see the orange glow of the fire burning in the back and plumes of smoke blurring our vision of the area behind the subject. He blurs the fire so we focus on the subject infront of us but we still understand the ferocity of the subject’s environment. He uses the smoke to add focus on the subject further so the audience is forced to look at the intense eyes of the child.

This next photo from Hugo is extremely thought provoking. I chose this as Hugo uses all the aspects of purity in contrast to that of darkness. His subject is a small, blonde, blue eyed child who is wearing an all white gown. He uses a child to represent purity and innocence, her blue eyes creates intense imagery of the sea and the sky both strong representatives of freedom. He pits his subject on top of darkly coloured tree with little light shining on it. He does this to show the contrast between the subject and the tree, the contrast between light and dark both physically and visually. The darkly coloured tree’s logs reach out like tendrils of darkness trying to leech away the subject’s innocence and all the positive aspects of life she represents in this photo.

The final photo I chose from Hugo is this black and white portrait of a man with all the textures on his face amplified. I was attracted to this photo because it highlights the piercing eyes of the subject. Because the grains and textures of the subject’s face are so dark it makes the audience focus on the subject’s eyes more so. They are strikingly bright compared to his skin and convey a beautiful image

I replicated Hugo’s previous photo with this one. I highlighted the grain and texture to replicate the colours on the subject’s face