Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present What the Light Falls On, a solo exhibition by Pieter Hugo.

Comprising more than 100 images taken over the last 23 years, What the Light Falls On is Hugo’s meditation on life, his lens delicately focused on birth, death, and the rites between. The artist remarks:

A lot of the work that I do is in the post-documentary tradition, concerned with investigating the veracity and possibilities of the medium. But for this project I wanted to go back to what attracted me to photography in the first place: curiosity, being present in the world, transience, the medium’s storied relationship with death. To explore how an image can be ‘enough’, not needing anything more than to exist as a document of time, a testament that someone bore witness, took a position or felt something enough to make it.

Where Hugo’s previous series functioned as visual essays, exploring a specific theme to create a body of work with clearly defined parameters, What the Light Falls On evolves out of an ethos that mirrors Kin, created between 2006 and 2013. The images in What the Light Falls On were not created within a prescribed framework; instead, they mark the artist’s relationship with place and time, articulating what he terms an ‘essential wanderlust’. Made around the world, these photographs offer a response to the dilemma of navigating ‘the morass of imagery produced daily in era in which everything is photographed’. At the heart of this series, edited and exhibited as a flow of consciousness, is the question, ‘How can one find the authenticity of the medium in this deluge?’. Where Kin began with the birth of his daughter, What the Light Falls On arrived at its resolution though its culminating photograph – of Hugo’s deceased father. ‘It’s tied into middle age,’ he states, ‘getting softer both physically and emotionally, the beauty and the tragedy, the cruelty and the tenderness, these cycles of life. As the philosopher Seneca succinctly observes: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”’

In this sprawling project, Hugo’s most ambitious to date, the distinctions between portraiture, landscape and still life converge into the purpose of reflecting lived and emotional states, rendered sympathetically while remaining confrontational. Hugo states: ‘The photographs are global, not so much concerned with the particularities of the people and places I’m depicting; rather, in a mature way of seeing, there is a deeply felt resonance between self and other that emerges – a response to Helmar Lerski’s assertion that “in every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on”.’

The exhibition opens Saturday 26 October 10am to 1pm. The artist will give a walkabout on Thursday 31 October at 11.30am