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THE ALBINO PROJECT BY PIETER HUGO
Date: 05 March, 2004
Pieter Hugo’s portraits of albinos are actually fragments of mirrors. When you really look, those pale, transparent eyes, that hair of a color without color, that fragile and delicate skin, they really tell us about ourselves. They bring out fears and our prejudices to the surface.
“An albino is a person, not a condition”, Manaliso Ngcobo, 27, of the Albino Association in South Africa rightly states. And yet these people become a kind of model for diversity and of our ability to confront and share in it. Culture doesn’t even come into play here – there are no issues of race or religion. It is nature pure and simple, mocking perhaps, more stepmother than mother, but still nature. Albinism is in fact a genetic condition that can strike men and women of different races. The condition is an absence or deficiency of melanin, the protein that gives color to skin. The main consequences are a characteristic vulnerability of the skin, leading to a high risk of cancer, and vision problems. But even so these are not the worst things that albinos must put up with. Worse that these things is the ignorance and prejudice that force them to live like outcastes, rejects of the human race, and at the same time exposes our latent xenophobia. Pieter Hugo has chosen to look right into their eyes to make us ask ourselves at least one question and voice one doubt: after all who can say what angels are made of?
Author’s biography
Pieter Hugo, South African photographer, has worked in Fabrica’s photography department for two years. His interests alternate between socially aware documentary photography–especially on themes relevant to Africa and other developing countries–and work which is more artistic and experimental. The themes of his photographs go from child slavery in war-torn Sudan to Kurdish refugee camps in Italy, to maximum-security psychiatric hospitals in South Africa. His clients include the WHO, UNICEF, Anti-Slavery International and The New Yorker.
http://www.pieterhugo.com
Files for Download:
The Albino Project_en (The Albino Project_en.doc - 24.064 kb)
The Albino Project_it (The Albino Project_it.doc - 30.208 kb)
Lindi Msiza (Lindi Msiza.jpg - 1909.367 kb)
Malose Kunutu (Malose Kunutu.jpg - 2003.782 kb)
Steven Mohapi (Steven Mohapi.jpg - 1906.467 kb)
Vuyiswa Kama (Vuyiswa Kama.jpg - 1972.452 kb)
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