Output details

Beholder

In 2012, Schuman was commissioned by the artist Pieter Hugo and Prestel Publishing to write an extended essay that contextualised Hugo’s oeuvre and career within the realm of contemporary photography. The book, Pieter Hugo: This Must Be The Place was published to coincide with a mid-career survey/retrospective of the same name, which was exhibited at The Hague Museum of Photography (The Netherlands) and Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne, Switzerland) in the same year.

For nearly two decades, Pieter Hugo has been photographing his native continent of Africa, producing startling portraits and essays, whilst testing the limits of photographic conventions and documentary practice; this first retrospective of Pieter Hugo's award-winning work collected the most important images from the photographer's career to date. Schuman’s essay contextualized Hugo’s work within both fine-art and photographic histories, and primarily focused on how Hugo’s work engaged with and questioned the blurred realms between fact and fiction, stating: ‘Whether they allude to the domination of man over nature or of one culture over another, the co-dependence between photographer and subject, the submission of a photograph to the prejudices and preconceptions of its audience, or the unsettling contradictions that define the contemporary experience and the world at large, these astonishing photographs complicate rather than alleviate our troubled relationship with photography itself, and in doing so poignantly offer a refreshing way forward for a medium that might otherwise struggle to remain relevant in this new century.’

Furthermore, an excerpt from this essay was published in the photographic journal, Hotshoe International (Oct/Nov. 2012).