Pieter Hugo, Time magazine photos, Nollywood and related matters

First of all, congrats to the Ghanaians for winning the U-20 world cup. Good job guys!

So, today's issue: The blogosphere has been set ablaze with the discussion on the appropriateness, or lack thereof of Pieter Hugo's photoshoot on Nollywood that was picked up by Time Magazine.

If you have not seen the photos, please check them out here . Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the explanation for all the pics.

The pics were picked up by Time magazine and shown here . Here are a few of the more chaste pics reproduced below for your viewing (dis)pleasure:






As a bonafide rabid fan of Nollywood in particular and African film in general, I was totally outraged by these pics. And just for the record, I still am!

However, I was doing a little bit of research on the issue, and it seems that the dude is some kind of photographic shock jock, if the other images on his website are anything to go by. His fans interpret these pictures as some kind of "art". They apparently include Amy Stein who said:

The prolific and talented Pieter Hugo has a new body of work called Nollywood. Nollywood is the colloquial name given to the Nigerian film industry and all of the images appear to be portraits of actors in b-movies. The new photos share similarities to his previous work--desaturated tones and subjects looking at you with a bayonet gaze--but this work has a decided sense of humor. How does he do it?

Source

Excuse me while I roll my eyes for a minute!!

Worreva!!!!

Anyways, some other guy was so pissed off by the representation that he responded to Amy Stein with this article. He uses a lot of big, big grammar, but the bottomline is this - the pictures are represent the colonial image of Africa and are d%^*ned RACIST!

But what do we say about the people who cooperated to get the pics taken? None of whom I recognize anyways, avid nollywatcher that I am? I hear that one of them is a well known special effects guy in the horror genre of the industry (which I don't watch).

So, here is my angst about this whole thing - lack of context. If it had been clearly stated that the photoshoot was a far out exploration of the horror genre of Nollywood, I would have looked the other way. But to paint the entire industry with this backward brush, it smacks of an agenda to me. He is painting a single story of my beloved Nollywood which I find really, really annoying and offensive. Nowhere on the blurb he has on his website, or on Time Mag do they provide any context. In fact TIME introduces the pics as

"Nollywood: The Stars of Nigeria's Movie Biz"

Worraheck!! Who are these people? And now, Mrs suburban soccer mom looking at these pics from her home in the midwest will be convinced that those stories she has heard about people living in trees must be true, since these are the movies we are making.

This other dude agrees with me.

I find the whole thing extremely distasteful and annoying.

Do y'all think its "art" or a deliberate attempt to paint us as less than - aka racism?

Please weigh in.