Quotes by
Pieter Hugo

lf it's not essential with what you are showing, leave it out of the picture.

I’m interested in photography because it sits somewhere between document and art.

One of the things intrinsic to the medium of photography is that it’s inherently voyeuristic, and that’s what gives the medium a lot of energy. But it also creates problems that you have to solve.

For me to work at all as a photographer, I have to be conscious always of the problems acquired in what I do. I have to be conscious, if you like, of the impossibility of photography.

It’s not that hard to learn how to shoot—the hardest thing is to find a voice.

Are straight people only allowed to photograph straights, are lesbians only allowed to photograph lesbians?

I don’t think art has a responsibility to be pretty.

[Photography’s] true seduction lies in its foot in reality. It still has the pretense of being a quasi-document.

I am looking because I am interested in looking. I want to look, and I want to look without apology. And with the intensity that I want to look with, I want to be looked back at. And if you can get that in a portrait or in a landscape, you have an energy.

Photographs are like children, they grow, go about the world and no longer belong to you.

Photography is finished.

In the process of working in any medium, at some stage, you become aware of its limitations. For me it was realizing that photography could only describe the surface of things. It’s symbolic. It can’t do much more than that.

The picture takes 1/125th of a second. The photographer is always trying to compensate for that brevity, to extend the process.

I’m quite a light person if you meet me but I’m quite heavy in my work, and in the process of making the picture you imbue that with a sense of gravity and urgency.

My work used to be incredibly confrontational: I wanted to point at things and say to society, “Look, look!” I wanted people to feel uncomfortable and be aware of their hypocrisy.