THERE'S A PLACE IN HELL FOR ME & MY FRIENDS by Pieter Hugo

ポートレイト写真家として、アフリカ地域で長年続く貧困や環境問題に対するインパクトのあるヴィジュアルを表現することで注目を集める南アフリカ生まれの写真家、ピーター・ヒューゴ(Pieter Hugo)の作品集。本作では色のイメージを変換するデジタルプロセスを通じて、白人から黒人まで様々なモデルの皮膚中の色素(メラニン)を強調。大衆文化中にある美の基準、そして皮膚の色に基づいた人種の区別の矛盾を提示する。

Pieter Hugo's There's a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends is a series of close-up portraits of the artist and his friends, all of whom call South Africa home. Through a digital process of converting colour images to black and white while manipulating the colour channels, Hugo emphasizes the pigment (melanin) in his sitters’ skins so they appear heavily marked by blemishes and sun damage. The resulting portraits are the antithesis of the airbrushed images that determine the canons of beauty in popular culture, and expose the contradictions of racial distinctions based on skin colour. As the critic Aaron Schuman writes,

“although at first glance we may look ‘black’ or ‘white’, the components that remain ‘active’ beneath the surface consist of a much broader spectrum. What superficially appears to divide us is in fact something that we all share, and like these photographs, we are not merely black and white – we are red, yellow, brown, and so on; we are all, in fact, coloured.”

by Pieter Hugo

REGULAR PRICE ¥38,500  (tax incl.)

hardcover
114 pages
225 x 282 mm
black and white
limited edition of 1,000 copied
2012

RARE

shortlist of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2012

published by OODEE