Provenance

Aperture Foundation/Stevenson.

The Gary Eisenberg Collection.

Notes

"[Californian Wildflowers] was taken in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco and Skid Row in Los Angeles where I photographed a wide spectrum of homeless people. There are big differences, culturally and socially, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. In South California homelessness is criminalized; Skid Row is aggressive, the police are gung-ho and it is all about race. By contrast, in North California the police are tolerant and sympathetic, and you do not feel threatened on the street. I first visited San Francisco two decades ago; it is the only place I have been mugged. Even now, the city still has vestiges of the freak scene of the 1960s. But the economic impact of Silicon Valley and the digital economy is palpable. The city is facing an identity crisis. The Tenderloin is exempt from some of it because the majority of its buildings are owned by nonprofit organizations with no interest in benefiting financially from gentrification. It feels like an anarchic community in the midst of a crazy boom.

Homelessness is one word that covers a range of different situations. I met people with mental disorders, addicts, victims of the 2008 recession, war veterans, men and women who had made bad lifestyle choices, as well as people who for whatever reason liked living rough. Notwithstanding their terrible circumstances, which are real and inescapable, there is something quite ecstatic in the poses and gestures of the people I photographed. A lawlessness too. It required a very different way of working to what I have become accustomed to. For starters, no tripod and no lights. Normally, I ask for permission to take someone's portrait: here, it was not always possible as people were often out of it. The series includes a number of diptychs. At the time I was reading a short story by James Salter in which he describes seeing his wife as all the non-idealized pictures he had taken of her and thrown away. I liked this idea. I think I was trying to get away from the photograph as monument with this series, allowing more accidents to happen in my portraits.

I am not unfamiliar with homelessness. The streets around my studio in Cape Town are home to a large population of unhoused poor. Their number probably exceeds that in California. I have made portraits of homeless people in South Africa. It is a fraught genre, so often linked to a moralizing stance. I understand the imperative to witness, especially in South Africa, but I am not interested in having my own photography become a vehicle for a moral crusade against poverty, capitalism or the uncaring state. I tried to remain true to this instinct in my work in California."

Pieter Hugo
Cape Town, 2016

https://pieterhugo.com/Text-CALIFORNIAN-WILDFLOWERS, accessed 25 August 2024