Pieter Hugo's Nollywood

I have always been a fan of Pietor Hugo's photography. He is a white South African man who has travelled all over Africa, creating his own story of tragic and haunting images with his camera. He travelled to Rwanda in 2004, a decade after the genocide and his photos offer a forensic view of some of the sites of mass execution. Ten years later, he was still able to capture the blood, pain and suffering as if it were only yesterday. When i heard he was doing a piece on NOLLYWOOD. I was surprised, excited, intrigued, apprehensive... the works! He stated he has always been intrigued by the Nollywood industry, in particular, the spiritual & mythological aspects. He asked a team of 'actors' and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets, Hugo initiated the creation of a verisimilar reality.

His vision of the film industry’s interpretation of the world results in a gallery of hallucinatory and unsettling images.

When asked about what the images represented, he said; "The tableaux of the series depict situations clearly surreal but that could be real on a set; furthermore, they are rooted in the local symbolic imaginary. The boundaries between documentary and fiction become very fluid, and we are left wondering whether our perceptions of the real world are indeed real".

Please note that some of the images are indeed disturbing but they nonetheless capture the mythical aspect that surrounded Nollywood. I say the word 'surrounded' because i feel we have moved away from all the ritualistic type movies, the Nneka the pretty serpents, the Karashika's etc etc. I still think the images are genius. Disturbing but genius.