Thursday night's special may not have been a narrative necessity, but it was a welcome joy to visit with Leslie Knope, Ron Swanson and the rest of our old pals.
(Image credit: Ben Cohen/NBC)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/3d7nMUW
via IFTTT
Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.
The AMD Ryzen 7 4700U arrives at a key moment for laptop CPUs. After AMD launched its 7nm Ryzen 4000 CPU family at CES and dealt a first, crushing blow with the Ryzen 9 4900HS chip in high-end notebook PCs, the company has its eyes on the real prize: U-class laptops. Yes, those sub-three-pound slivers (known in a past life as Ultrabooks) everyone casually carries into meetings or lays on the table in a cafe.
This baby monitor can operate as a conventional video monitor or a sophisticated smart camera, but a paid subscription is required to unlock its full feature set.
Our first taste of the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U came in the form of the affordable Acer Swift 3 laptop. After AMD launched its 7nm Ryzen 4000 CPU family at CES and dealt a first, crushing blow with the Ryzen 9 4900HS chip in high-end notebook PCs, the Ryzen 7 4700U tackles the next challenge: U-class, thin-and-light laptops. The company’s offerings in this area have been weak in the past, so AMD focused on optimizing Ryzen 4000 for thinner notebook PCs. Everyone wants to know if AMD’s Ryzen “U” chips finally have what it takes.
Kwame Alexander, NPR's poet in residence, reads the latest crowdsourced poem, this one focused on how you've been affected by and coping during the global coronavirus pandemic.
(Image credit: Simone Golob/Getty Images)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/2VP6sy5
via IFTTT
In a topsy-turvy world where Apple is releasing $399 iPhones and OnePlus is making $999 premium phones, the OnePlus 8 should be the perfect foil to the OnePlus 8 Pro. After all, OnePlus built its reputation on showing up the high-priced Galaxies and Pixels of the world with premium-specced Android phones for pennies on the dollar. It’s only fair that it does the same for its own four-figure phone.
In some ways, the OnePlus 8 delivers on that promise. It has a great screen, the newest Snapdragon processor, 5G, and a triple-camera array at a price lower than the Pixel 4 and Galaxy S10. But when you zoom in on what the OnePlus 8 offers for its price ($699 from OnePlus), which is $200 higher than last year’s 7T (currently discounted to $499 from OnePlus), it becomes clear the while it’s a very good phone, it’s not quite the killer bargain OnePlus wants us to think it is.
The OnePlus 8 Pro ushers in a bunch of firsts for the humble Android phone maker. It’s the first OnePlus display with a hole-punch camera and a 120Hz refresh rate. It’s the first OnePlus phone with wireless charging and a quad-camera. It’s the first time OnePlus has made Wi-Fi 6 and 5G standard. Heck, it’s even the first OnePlus phone with IP-rated water resistance.
It’s also the first OnePlus handset to top a thousand bucks (with tax), more than three times the cost of the original OnePlus One. To be fair, things have changed quite a bit since 2014, when Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S5 cost just $650 off-contract. But even though OnePlus can claim the 8 Pro costs $300 less than the closest apples-to-apples comparison Galaxy phone, a four-figure sticker price is still much more shocking on a OnePlus phone than a Samsung one.
Google Meet is now free for everyone. As part of the video conferencing land rush begun by Zoom, Google has moved Google Meet out of its paid, premium tier, and made it available to both consumers and professionals alike.
In the same way that rival Facebook Messenger Rooms requires you to belong to Facebook to launch a new Room, Google Meet does require users to have a Google account, such as a Gmail email address. The free tier also limits users to just 60 minutes, though the company said it won’t enforce it until after September 30.
From children painting rainbows to spread their streets with hope, to letters of recognition to the health service, working long days and nights —during the current pandemic, more than any form of technology, the window has triumphed as an accessible and human way to connect with our communities.
It was only two weeks ago that Maartje Slijpen and Brenda Waegemaekers, the creative team at Dutch advertising agency KesselsKramer, wondered from their own windows, whether they could celebrate this new medium as a subject matter. “If these windows could talk, what would they tell us?”
They reached out to Efthimis Filippou, oscar-winning screenwriter of The Lobster, Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Dear. “We asked him because of his ability to mix human truths and meaning with light-hearted humour and absurdity,” says Waegemaekers. “We knew we didn’t want to make it too cheesy.”
Filippou was enthused by the project, and finished the screenplay in just a couple of days. The team then reached out to 62 international artists, tasking them with a small part of Filippou’s script, to recreate in their windows.
“I think the charm of the project is that everyone gets a small part — of course the screenwriter had the biggest — but every artist can focus on just one element, and put their energy into it,” says Waegemaekers.
Admittedly, there were many challenges — working across several timezones was one of them, but also artists who only had access to eighth-floor windows, and unruly punctuation marks (“The full stop flew off!”).
“But having these small roles made our questions smaller too,” says Slijpen. “If you have to come up with something in a day or two, you can’t make your ideas too big. We felt we needed to use this momentum while we could, and everyone involved understood that too”.
Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.
If we had $750 to build a new PC from scratch, what would we spend our money on? That was the challenge presented to the Full Nerd gang on PCWorld’s YouTube channel, and the selections diverged much less than in our recent $3,000 PC build challenge.
Keep reading if you don’t mind spoilers, or just watch the video below if you want to hear us walk through the hardware in our builds without knowing what’s coming.
The biggest takeaway? If you’re building a $750 gaming PC, AMD’s modern Ryzen 5 processors are what you want. While the $235 Ryzen 5 3600X earns the nod as the best pick for most people in our roundup of the best CPUs for PC gaming, the Ryzen 5 3600 is just a step behind, and it’s a killer value at just $173 right now. Every single one of us chose the 6-core, 12-thread chip as the brains of our systems. And it’s not just us: The builds submitted on the Full Nerd Discord server all tapped into Ryzen 5 as well, though some of those leaned on older Ryzen 5 1600 and 2600 chips to squeeze in even more savings while still tapping into 12 threads of goodness.
The PNY Pro Elite (CS2060) is a portable SSD that doesn’t break the bank. In real-world testing, it performed on a par with the Samsung T5, and even the newer T7 Touch, but it costs about $20 to $70 less. It comes with the requisite cables and Acronis True Image (one of the best backup programs you can buy), perhaps surpassing Samsung’s amenities, so you miss out on nothing. It's a great value that earns our Editor's Choice.
Kennard, who is best known for his work for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1970s and 80s, studied at The Slade School of Fine Art in the late-1960s, during which he became involved with the anti-Vietnam War protests. He currently works as professor of political art at the Royal College of Art.
Three months ago, Selley sent Kennard a copy of his photobook. The pair have never met, but during the current lock down, they were able to connect over video-call. Here, we present their conversation, in which they discuss the importance of making accessible art, and the role of photomontage in protest and times of crisis.
George Selley: Hi Peter.
Peter Kennard: Hi George, how are you keeping?
GS: I’m okay. I’m one of the lucky ones, I suppose. And you?
PK: Me too, I’m at home in Stoke Newington in Hackney. I haven’t managed to get to my studio, so I’ve been here, but I feel very aware of what people are doing out there. It’s so weird, isn’t it? It’s quiet where I am, there’s no one around, and yet everyone is aware of what is going on in the hospitals. Where are you?
GS: I’m just down in Peckham. It’s strange how drastically different people’s experiences of this will be. I remind myself of that all the time, that it’s not the same for everybody. I wanted to ask how you see the crisis, from a larger perspective. Some people see it quite negatively — that it could become a catalyst for more authoritarianism and increased nationalism — but some people see it as an opportunity for positive change.
PK: It depends what side of the bed I get out of. One day I think it opens up the possibilities for a different world — a better world. The next day I wake up and think, “Fucking hell, we’ve got Trump, Johnson, all these characters — they could get stronger out of this and dictatorships could actually embed themselves even more”. Other days, I think people will become more aware. There’s lots of different possibilities that come out of it, some very negative and some positive. I think in terms of the climate, it could be positive. We’ve realised we’re not all-conquering humans — we can be slayed by a virus.
GS: Photomontage as a medium emerged as a reaction to a crisis — a pretty big one in the form of the First World War. You abandoned painting in the 1970s, in search of new forms of expression, which could bring art and politics together. Why were you interested in merging those two things?
PK: It was because of what was going on in the late-1960s. I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement in London, and through that I saw how the police acted during demonstrations — I was at the 1968 anti-war demonstration at Grosvenor Square. When I found out about the atrocities that were actually taking place in Vietnam, I wanted to find a way to make work that related to that. That’s when I started using photography, because photographs of what was going on were in all the newspapers. It was a way to make something that could be used outside of the art realm. I wanted to get away from work that had to be in the gallery, and I saw the leftist magazines and newspapers of that time as a good way to get my work out there.
GS: That’s one of the things that really resonates with me about your work, it’s accessible, and it makes direct statements. Thinking ofPhoto Op— the image of Tony Blair taking a selfie in front of a burning oil field — almost anybody can engage with it. Is accessibility something that you place importance on?
PK: That was one of the images that came out of a collaboration with Cat Phillips. Something that I’ve always been concerned with is the audience. If you want to actually engage with people in a real way, politically, making work for a small elite art audience doesn’t work. I’m aware that in making work accessible, sometimes it loses its subtlety, but if I’m doing posters for the street, they’re up against corporate media so you have to do something that gets through to people in a few seconds. That’s always been really important, getting the message out to the people who are engaged in the struggles that I’m addressing.
GS: When I was studying photojournalism I went to a talk at the Frontline Club about Tim Hetherington. The host was explaining an approach that he called the ‘Trojan horse theory’, where he would frame a story as if it was about something universal, like football, but it was really addressing something much deeper, like war. In doing so, he could get people to think about things without them realising that they were there, like the trojan horse — slipping the message in through the back door. Your work is quite direct, but it is similar in approach, particularly through your use of humor and satire. You conceal a darker or deeper statement using a universal language — the visual language of humor.
PK: Humor is a way to get people to look at stuff. I suppose I was influenced by work from the 1930s, like the theories of Walter Benjamin and this idea of a rupture in an image: you break an image open to show what’s actually going on, or what you think is actually going on. That involves humour, because you’re showing that beneath the exterior of politics, there is something completely different. If one can find a way to show it, that in itself is humorous, or darkly humorous, one could say. I think Photo Op, the piece with Tony Blair, works because people find it funny, but in a bleak sort of way. Nowadays it’s difficult to make an image that actually lasts for very long. Billions of images being created every five minutes, so one’s got to find some way of making an image that will last. You can’t really legislate for that, it just happens.
GS: I wanted to ask your advice on something. Often what gets me into a project is a moralistic drive, something that appalls me, or an injustice. But once I start researching abuses of power, it leads me to quite an angry place sometimes, because you come to see how blatant it is and you can’t figure out why it’s not represented in the way that it should be. I find that this anger can alienate the viewer, because in a way, I’ve created a reverse propaganda. Something I’m trying to do more of is to provide the tools for the viewer to deduce for themselves why something is unjust, but then I feel like I’m in a constant battle between telling it straight with passion, albeit in a highly subjective way, and being a little bit more subtle and nuanced.
PK: I relate strongly to that, because I have another way of working which involves a more subjective use of paint and photography — work that doesn’t reveal itself immediately to the viewer, but has a different sort of depth to it, in comparison to work that is very direct. I used to think I could merge the two, but now I realise I can’t, it’s just different ways of working. I don’t think one is better than the other. When I’m looking at the work in your book, it’s totally of you, it’s not something you’ve imposed on yourself, because you think you should, it’s totally integrated into your thinking. I think there is a subtlety in that.
GS: Do you feel that you are treading the line between being an artist in the art world, and being an activist?
PK: I come from a generation that’s ended up creating all this shit for young people now. I’ve been very privileged because I started working as a telephone operator for many years while I was squatting, and then managed to get into teaching. I also got money from doing commissioned work, which enabled me to have a certain freedom to make art that I didn’t have to sell in galleries. That is not possible for young people now, because teaching has become incredibly tough. I’ve always tried to find a way to make political work because I was aware that I wasn’t going to be able to make a living out of it. It’s a sort of scattergun approach, which I think a lot of artists have. You’ve got to keep all the plates spinning at once so you can make it work.
GS: There seems to be a long history of photomontage being present at physical protests — the placard as a symbol is featured in your work. What do you think it is about photomontage that makes it such a staple communicator in a protest?
PK: When you combine two images, a new meaning comes through. And that meaning is related to people’s actions in terms of dissent, and protest. If you have those sorts of images on placards, it has a strong, active effect. The work I did for CND [below], which is still used on placards, shows an action. The idea was that we should never show these missiles unless they are being broken. One of the things about images of nuclear weapons is that they seem inextricable, like they’re part of nature, and this image shows that they can be broken, they can be destroyed, and something else can come through them. That’s the same with all different forms of montage, which I think is the main tool of art of the 20th century. You go right back to The Wasteland in poetry, or Eisenstein in film, and music and the use of sampling. The 20th century was very much about the culture of fragmentation.
GS: Are you working on anything at the moment?
PK: I did a book called Visual Dissent last year for Pluto Press, which was looking into my 50 years of making work. Now I’m just working with images and seeing what will come from them. I think the way the world is at the moment I’ve got to keep going on in the trajectory of trying to do something quite direct. Especially after the coronavirus, the world’s not going to go back to being the same as it was before. The new normal is not the old normal.
George Selley’s photobook, A Study of Assassination, links unclassified CIA documents with a fruits company that lobbied for the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the then newly-elected leader of Guatemala, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.Peter Kennard’s latest photobook is a illustrated anthology showcasing key images from Kennard’s work as Britain’s foremost political artist over the last fifty years.
—
If you are an emerging photographer interested in interviewing an artist who has influenced your practice, please reach out to editorial@1854.media.
—
from British Journal of Photography https://ift.tt/2zDDx7x
via IFTTT
Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.
Over 140 photographers have donated prints to the online fundraiser Photographs for the Trussell Trust. Each print is 8 x 11 inches and priced at £100; all profits, bar £10 for production costs, will go to the Trussel Trust, which supports two-thirds of food banks across the UK.
Food banks, already stretched, have been under increasing pressure since the advent of the pandemic. 300 per cent more people are visiting food banks compared to this time last year — a figure, resulting, in part, from the social and economic toll inflicted by restrictions implemented to fight COVID-19.
Founded in 1997, the Trussell Trust supports over 1200 food bank centres nationwide, ensuring people in crisis receive at least three days’ of food. In the UK, the restrictions of lockdown have prevented many of the 14 million people already living in poverty from eating properly: three weeks into the lockdown, The Food Foundation disclosed that eight million adults have experienced food insecurity as a result of not being able to afford or access it.
Featuring prints by over 100 British and UK-based photographers, including Clementine Schneidermann, Jack Davison, Olivia Arthur, Jeremy Deller, Harley Weir,Juergen Teller, and Nadav Kander, the first 100 prints will be released today, 27 April, at 12:00 GMT, with the second release of additional images this Wednesday 29 April.
“In response to this emergency and inspired by the successful Italian ‘100 Fotografi per Bergamo’ initiative and New-York-based ‘Pictures for Elmhurst’, we have initiated a photography print sale fundraiser here in the UK to support the Trussell Trust,” explained the organisers Alexandra Leese, Simon Rogers, and Bianca Raggi.
All prints can be viewed and purchased from midday on 27 April via thefundraiser website.
Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.
Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.
For his new book, Witold Szablowski tracked down the chefs who fed autocrats like Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha and Idi Amin. He says the book isn't just about food, but about how dictatorships rise and grow.
(Image credit: Penguin Books)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/2VEvYWM
via IFTTT
When Nancy Redd was a kid, she was embarrassed by the bonnet she wore over her hair every night. "I didn't want my daughter growing up with that same shame," she says.
(Image credit: Random House Books for Young Readers)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/2S649EE
via IFTTT
Hendrix's new novel, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, stars a group of determined women who band together to take on a suave supernatural threat in their community.
(Image credit: Albert Mitchell)
from Arts & Life : NPR https://ift.tt/2zzDFFb
via IFTTT
Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.
Pieter Hugo has named his latest series after a legendary Mexican folk song, La Cucaracha, which tells the tale of a five-legged cockroach, “Hobbled by life, but triumphal all the same”. Although its roots are unknown, stretching back centuries, the song probably originated in Spain and was popularised in Mexico during the Revolution, when the lyrics were changed and adapted according to whose side you were on.
To Ashraf Jamal, the South African academic who has written a foreword to Hugo’s new book (published by RM Editions), the song is a classic example of duende, a term used in Latin folklore that refers to a ‘spirit’, which lies within the tune and inspires its story. And to the Cape Town-based photographer, it was the duende of this tragic yet joyous tune that captured his imagination when he first heard it on a visit to Mexico in April 2018.
Hugo had been invited over by Francisco Berzunza for a project in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico, which the curator had titled Hacer Noche. The exhibition, whose title translates as ‘Crossing Night’, was to explore “the relationship between violence and death, the ethics of how we relate to corpses, our rituals of life, death and the afterlife, our connections with our ancestors”, focusing on how these concerns are perceived in Mexican and South African culture. Berzunza wanted Hugo to reflect these dark ideas – with their connotations of hedonism, transgression and loss – inviting him to make new photographs. “His only brief to me,” says Hugo, “was that the work be about sex and mortality.” On a call from his car, heading off on a trip to the bush, Hugo tells me, “I began to think about the liminal spaces between life, death and rebirth”.
In the introduction to the series, Hugo has written of his disquiet about “a very different relationship with death here to what I am used to”. “If one looks beyond the clichés of dancing skeletons and sugar skulls, there’s a deeply complicated connection with mortality,” he writes. “Mexico has a particular ethos and aesthetic; there is an acceptance that life has no glorious victory, no happy ending. Humour, ritual, a strong sense of community and an embrace of the inevitable make it possible to live with a tragic and often unacceptable situation.”
He was also confronted with a different set of art historical references. Throughout his initial residency, Hugo based himself at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, which houses the National Museum of History. He became fascinated by a large mural titled From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to the Revolution, by the Mexican social realist artist David Alfaro Siqueiros (who also gained notoriety for taking part in a failed assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky).
When we speak on the phone, Hugo describes the huge, multi-wall artwork as “like a photo essay in one huge painting”. It sparked in him an interest in the artistic potential of mural art on his photographic work. “Photographers often aim to capture one moment, whereas muralism takes on multiple facets of history,” he says. “As you walk through, you’re taken through the various phases of a historical moment.” How, Hugo wondered, could this idea be applied to portraiture? “It made me feel quite playful. It allowed me to reference art historical motives that I wanted to explore further. It made me think about the way our bodies and faces often retain and reflect traces of our histories.”
After a month in Mexico, Hugo exhibited an early edit of the work, then titled Aquí se rompió una taza (which was roughly translated to ‘The party is over’ in English), at Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Oaxaca. “But I decided I wasn’t done,” says Hugo. “Because something had shifted out there in the way I normally work.” After the initial exhibition, he decided to continue working, making four month- long trips to Mexico over the course of 2018 and 2019. Throughout this time, he travelled widely, moving from the industrialised zones of the capital up to Tijuana near the US border and the colonial town of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the central Highlands, then out into the desert area of Hermosillo, the mountainous regions of Ixtepec, and the indigenous Zapotec town of Juchitán de Zaragoza in the southern state of Oaxaca. On his return to Cape Town, Hugo set about processing and editing the imagery, mapping it out in his large studio space.
Mexico, Hugo says, is often an anarchic and surreal place. “It is such a visual culture, an incredibly garish culture,” he says. “It’s flamboyant, rich, saturated, and it has an amazing lexicon of imagery, one completely made up of its own vocabulary.” Yet it is in many ways defined by the “dark undercurrent of the narco-state”, he also notes. “Mexico has a bloody history and that’s been compounded by the narco-state, which is ubiquitous. There’s a constant threat of violence that permeates all social strata, and it’s often a very visual display, a very visual manifestation. You will often see bodies with limbs dismembered hanging off of highways. Everyone is influenced by that in some way or another.”
As a result, the country is rich with graveside rituals, ancestor- honouring festivals and morbid rites of passage, each of which comes with its own formal and highly decorative code of dress. Mexico, Hugo notes, is the number-one consumer of hair gel in the world. “They look for any excuse to get dressed up and have a festival,” he says. “There’s one every second day, a pageant or a performance. It’s very embedded in their culture.” It is normal, then, to assume exaggerated characters, to escape one’s life to play a fantastical role – even while in doing so one is paying homage to the dead. It’s mourning as performance. “Life and death are very close, very accepted, but very contradictory. I found it difficult to reconcile the narco reality with the people I met there. I very rarely encountered any sort of aggression, even when I met people who were directly involved in this violent narco world.”
Hugo was born in Johannesburg in 1976. Aged 14, he watched Nelson Mandela walk free from prison, witnessing first-hand the end of apartheid. The years that followed, which coupled huge advances for majority rights alongside rising inequality and poverty, “was a transformative experience,” he says. In small, exploratory ways, Hugo started to photograph these changes. He remembers the first photograph he took and printed was of a homeless woman lying in the same street that, later in life, became home to his studio of today.
As a young professional, Hugo initially found work in the film industry in Cape Town, before undertaking a two-year residency at the Benetton-owned Fabrica research centre in Treviso, Italy, which led him towards professional photography. Hugo’s work to date has focused almost entirely on the marginalised people and strange, human-altered landscapes of his native Africa. For his first major series, titled Looking Aside, he trained his camera on blind and destitute street dwellers, on albinos who had been rejected by their clan, aged beggars and Aids sufferers – each photographed in the clinical-white surroundings of his studio. In 2005, he began work on the series that brought him to wider international attention,
The Hyena and Other Men. The work captured in a cross-pollination
of documentary photography and performative portraiture, the young street performers of Lagos, with their wild yet captive animals smiling at the end of a leash. Then, in 2009, Hugo photographed the people and landscape of an expansive technology dump of obsolete technology on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, in a series titled Permanent Error.
He’d become interested in photography via the ‘Bang-Bang Club’,
a group of four South African photojournalists who became world famous for their coverage of heightened violence in the townships in the period when apartheid was coming to an end, up to the first election open to all races, in 1994. Yet Hugo’s work can be seen as a reaction, and indeed counterbalance, to their frontline news reportage.
He cites the late South African David Goldblatt and the Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov as touchpoints – both documentarists who were transgressive of the cultures they captured. Goldblatt once toldBJP: “I want to capture the underbelly of the society and value system that underlay South Africa”. And that seems a neat way to describe Hugo’s work as well – except that Hugo also learned to interrogate his own role in that journey. “I am of a generation that approaches photography with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything,” he once said.
Hugo, then, has always invited us to question what he is showing us, to understand that nothing is ever entirely what it seems. La Cucaracha is another step down this road, he says today. “It’s a body of work that is very much not situated in the documentary tradition,” he says. “It’s a collection of single images, rather than a creation of narrative, and there’s less of a dialogue between the singular images. That was an interesting challenge for me.”
I ask him how he navigated the cultural gap between his home country and that of Mexico, and if that radically changed the way he approached portrait-taking. Yet Hugo responds by noting the parallels between his culture and that of Mexico. “It’s a post-revolutionary society with a colonial history,” he says. “It has an indigenous culture that has been repressed. Racism is prevalent. Like South Africa, it is a so-called developing economy with socialist aspirations and similar class structures. It’s a culture I found very easy to identify with, because the meta narrative is similar to here.”
So, as he did with previous projects, Hugo set about finding this multivalent identity – and exposing the limitations of photography – through beautifully stylised portraits. Each portrait is given a descriptive title “that alludes to a reference or an inspiration from where the image comes from,” he says. In The snake charmer, a naked man holds an albino snake as it curls around his leg. For The advocate at home [above], Hugo pictured a man he met at
a photography course lounging on his sofa wearing nothing but his socks.
Then there are images such as The sex worker [above], portraits of ‘Muxes’ [below]– the Zapotec culture’s term for transgender women. These images may be distinctly Mexican, but they are universal too. Through these portraits, Hugo allows us to investigate how ritual, tradition and community – from every culture across the globe – allow us to begin to understand the ever-complex kinship between the vivacity of life as we live it and the constant shadow of death. Hugo is searching for duende. He is reflecting the ghost back to us. Under Hugo’s lens, we are all broken cockroaches, fighting the dying of the light – and singing of it too.
