Jan, Martie, Kayala, Florence and Basil Meyer in their Home, Messina/Musina Series

Notes

"For example, Hugo’s Jan, Martie, Florence and Basil Meyer in their home faces us with an uneasy archive of the matter-of-fact everyday — an “intimate”, if austere, portrait of a family sitting in their living room, decorated with family photographs, frilly curtains, and bronzed artefacts. Their banal “that-has-been” existentiality is on display with the same matter-of-factness as the objects that surround them. Why do I feel uncomfortable in the face of such objectifying matter-of-factness? Is it due to the photograph’s neutral objectivity (this family exists or existed somewhere on the margins, in a place called Musina, situated just South of the Limpopo River, which forms the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe), or is it due to the photograph’s kitsch theatre — its posed “what-will-be”?"¹

^1. G.T Schoeman, What is out of sight and un-foreseeable: Pieter Hugo’s filtered images, unpublished, University of the Free State, Free State, page 85.

Exhibited

Paris Photo, Paris, Water, the Origin of Life, 2007, another example from the edition exhibited.

Literature

G.T Schoeman, What is out of sight and un-foreseeable: Pieter Hugo’s filtered images, unpublished, University of the Free State, Free State, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on page 85.