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From ELEPHANT: "Hugo's latest work, There's a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends, ... [is] a series of portraits of him and his friends shot in colour and converted into black and white. By manipulating the color channels, he emphasized the melanin in the skin of his subjects, making it appear damaged and blemished. The result is beautiful. And anti-portrait." Hugo himself notes that the series is particularly controversial, and is intended as a commentary on colonialism and displacement.
The series strikes me as beautiful, yes, and also haunting, uncomfortable: it's riveting and disturbing. Hugo seems to undertake a Portrait of Dorian Gray type maneuver, taking the internally ugly and make it very externally apparent. It makes me think of racism, and the fact that it is sometimes invisible within white communities. It makes me think of how racism damages those who hold privilege as well as those who don't.
I wonder, though: why are the blemishes all dark? How would the pictures read if the blemishes were all white? How are race dynamics both deconstructed and reified by these images?
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