Pieter Hugo's 'Polyphonic' is something of a departure from previously conceptually themed exhibitions

In something of a departure from previously themed or conceptually specific exhibitions, Pieter Hugo's Polyphonic comprises over 100 head-and-shoulders portraits taken over almost 20 years. It continues the career survey approach of Being Present, his 2021 survey exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival.

As the title suggests, the collection of ostensibly straightforward portraits, stripped of background environments, ranges over a number of subjects, from different locations, walks of life and experience. Here are gender-fluid young models and transgender Neapolitan women, presidents, judges, homeless people and the artist himself, and his friends.

The exhibition statement offers an important organising principle for this polyphony of subjects gazing back at the viewer. It is a quote by Richard Avedon: a photographic portrait is a picture of ‘someone who knows they’re being photographed’.

Each of the subjects in the images do indeed reflect this knowledge. Given the absence of any other visual context in background or framing, our psychological tendency as viewers of these photographs is first to identify with their subjects, the very human figures in them. This is not to say we identify with them in a literal sense — their experiences and lives are not ours, these presidents, tattooed Mexicans and rock stars. Instead we provide these characters that we see in this stripped down setting with a narrative, a character or personality which is our imposition and our fantasy as a viewer.

As punk poet and rock legend Patti Smith gazes evenly back at us from a corner of the gallery, might we not relate to her as equals? Could we not have a conversation with ‘El Gato’, even though he lives in Mexico? What might we have said to FW De Klerk, looking so frail and vulnerable?

In the approachability and accessibility of these subjects, Hugo’s avowed humanism is most in evidence. His method manifests itself as indeed a polyphony — the advantage of a portmanteau show of this nature, culled from previous exhibitions, is to enable a dialogue. This happens between such ostensibly remote figures as presidents and judges, and the more marginalised and fringe figures from societies to which the artist seems naturally drawn. The documentation of these fringe figures has of course raised familiar concerns in the past in the context of the contemporary art sphere about exploitation and appropriation. 

A crucial intervention in this exhibition which militates against the objection du jour of cultural appropriation is the inclusion of a selection from Hugo’s exhibition ‘The Journey’ (2014). Mounted in a grid as opposed to the mostly single portraits of the rest of the show, this is essentially a sequence of infrared photographs of people asleep on a long-haul flight, most with eye masks and taken without their knowledge. Here Avedon’s dictum is ignored, and Hugo, in his artist’s statement, invokes Walker Evans’s famous subway photographs as a template for an investigation of the shift in the divide between the public and private. There are ethical considerations here, without doubt, and those boundaries are being crossed in producing the work. But the tortured and alienating expressions of these sleeping strangers on a plane dramatises the collapse of the private sphere — and the psychodrama of hidden human life — more than any theoretical observation would.

Hugo’s approach is at its strongest here, his lens finding a way to probe not only individual human subjects, but relationships — how they are established and why, who is included and who is excluded, and how?

At the other end of the scale from The Journey is the only other grid of images on the show, of a joyfully performative set of mostly gender-fluid young models, not posing, and not just looking back at the viewer, but entirely comfortable as the subject of the camera’s gaze. These two grids bracket Hugo’s insightful aesthetic.