“1994” by Pieter Hugo

In 1994, Pieter Hugo explores what he calls the ‘corrosive effects of history’. Looking back to when he was eighteen, Hugo remembers 1994 as both a pivotal and harrowing year – South Africa’s first democratic election in which Nelson Mandela was elected and the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi community.

Travelling to Rwanda in 2014, exactly two decades after the genocide in which nearly one million people were killed, Hugo was confronted with a landscape on which its devastating history had left its mark. Hugo states that, ‘unlike Germany where genocide was industrialised and out of sight, in Rwanda it was all over the landscape – every banana plantation, every church was a site of massacres.’

The subjects in these portraits, taken in villages in both Rwanda and South Africa, are children up to the age of sixteen, born after the events of 1994. For Hugo, this generation appeared to be unburdened by the past. The portraits present a multitude of contrasts and conflicts and are, typically to Hugo, unresolved images. Many of the children in the portraits are photographed wearing Sunday best or decorative dresses which provide contrast against the rich and gritty earth.

Against a landscape that has been witness to such horror, the children seem to offer hope and look towards the promise of the future. Saturated in memories of a devastated community, the African landscape acts as a backdrop for the portraits and seems to exude resilience. The portraits are powerful symbols of the ability to heal and regenerate.

Edition: First Edition
Publication Year: 2016
Condition: New
Notes: All items are final sale.