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Good Enough Mabaso, Orlando Pirates supporter, Coca-Cola Cup semi-final, Rustenburg, 2005
Pieter Hugo
Artwork 2005
Pieter Hugo's photograph 'Good Enough Mabaso, Orlando Pirates supporter, Coca-Cola Cup semi-final, Rustenburg, 2005'.
Artwork: Pieter Hugo, Good Enough Mabaso, Orlando Pirates supporter, Coca-Cola Cup semi-final, Rustenburg, 2005 (2005). C-print. 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson.
Artist Pieter Hugo Title Good Enough Mabaso, Orlando Pirates supporter, Coca-Cola Cup semi-final, Rustenburg, 2005 Date 2005 Materials C-print Dimensions 100 x 100 cm Credit Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson

From Phokeng Tshepo Setai and Alexander Richards, the curators of Exhibition Match '22:

For the body of work from which this photograph was taken, Hugo travelled to Rustenberg to take photos of Orlando Pirates fans at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium. These portraits of Orlando Pirates supporters are provocative images of modes of masculinity. Good Enough Sithole, the photograph’s subject, is one of the team’s staunchest supporters and is still present at most Pirates games to this day.

“My eye is drawn,” the photographer Pieter Hugo writes, “to the peripheral, particularly in Africa, and I negotiate contexts where the cultural nuances of our time are amplified.” Mediating the representation of marginalised people – in Africa and elsewhere – Hugo is attuned to the voyeurism of photography and its claims to realism. “I am of a generation that approaches photography,” he says, “with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything.” In all his photographs, his subjects participate in making their image. Hugo works with a large-format camera, which requires a setting up of the image, a conversation with his subject, necessitates time spent. As such, his photographs are never covert, never spontaneous, but made with the deliberate care the medium demands. Hugo’s photographic essays have included such various subjects as Liberian boy scouts, people with albinism, Nollywood actors, and Mexican muxe.

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