Nollywood
In the Nollywood series Pieter Hugo confronts the role of the photographer in the realm where fiction and reality interact. Nollywood is said to be the third largest film industry in the world, releasing onto the home video market approximately 1,000 movies each year. Such abundance is possible since films are realized in conditions that would make most of the western independent directors cringe. Movies are produced and marketed in the space of a week: low cost equipment, very basic scripts, actors cast the day of the shooting, “real life” locations. Despite the improvised production process, they continue to fascinate audiences.
In Africa, Nollywood movies are a rare instance of self-representation in the mass media.
The continent has a rich tradition of story-telling that has been expressed abundantly through oral and written fiction, but has never been conveyed through the mass media before.
Movies tell stories that appeal to and reflect the lives of its public: stars are local actors; plots confront the viewer with familiar situations of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, prostitution. The narrative is overdramatic, deprived of happy endings, tragic. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.
In his travels through West Africa, Hugo has been intrigued by this distinct style in constructing a fictional world where everyday and unreal elements intertwine. By asking 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.
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.
Federica Angelucci
top left: Emilia Ibeh, Doris Orji and Sharon Opiah. Enugu, Nigeria 2008
top centre: John Dollar Emeka. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
top right: Fidelis Elenwa. Enugu, Nigeria, 2009
bottom left: Ibegbu Natty. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom centre: Gabazzini Zuo. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom right: Thompson. Asaba, Nigeria, 2008
All works C-type prints, 102 x 102cm, in an edition of 9
Pieter Hugo in conversation with Federica Angelucci about Nollywood
24 May 2009
An obvious and important question is how did Nollywood come to interest you?
I have been working in Nigeria, and more generally in West Africa, over the last few years, and when travelling through West Africa, it became impossible not to watch these Nigerian movies. Wherever you went, whether it was your hotel, a bar, a restaurant, a police station, people were watching these movies all the time, with the sound at full volume. Initially I found these movies annoying because everybody was screaming all the time – and the speakers were crackling – and I couldn’t understand why people would want to watch this intense, transgressive, confrontational, badly made cinema all the time. I first thought that they were soap operas but I starting realizing that they were interesting in their own way because they were in many respects among the first examples of contemporary, mass media self-representation in Africa. These are movies made by Africans for Africans, with their own stories, unlike Hotel Rwanda, shot with French money by an American director, filmed in South Africa, for an audience in Canada, so to speak.
As you said, Nollywood stories are extremely edgy and intense, they also involve magic and inexplicable things and events. Do you think this can be a dramatization of something that is already there, and are an authentic reflection of a Nigerian reality?
Without reverting to some form of over-generalization, everyone who has worked in Nigeria will tell you that Nigerians scream, they have a very direct and loud way of communicating. Somehow these movies epitomize that.
I can relate to that. I am Italian and I can relate to Italy every single thing I have read about Nollywood. It is indeed very similar.
It is funny that you say that, because I have lived in Italy for a few years and initially I though that everyone I met was really rude. Eventually I realized that it sounds like someone is shouting or attacking you, and in fact he is politely asking you to pass the sugar.
As we know too well, it all depends on context and your relative experiences…. The movies are in a language that is foreign for you – did you have any difficulty in following the plot?
The films are easy to follow: there are elements of disbelief in some instance; especially in those in which the elements of witchcraft and Juju are predominant. Even though they are easy to follow, they are often hard to watch because there are editing and continuity issues and the sound is often poor.
Why the quality is still so low after almost 20 years of productions?
After 20 years, Nigerians are still addicted to the movies and the industry is booming but the production values remain slack. This is partially due to the way in which these movies are funded and the ridiculous deadlines imposed on the crew and the actors. Actors often receive the script on the day of the shooting, so there is no time to prepare for the role and character or immersing in the role. On movie sets you often see characters stumbling aver their lines and there would be no re-take, they would simply carry on and move to the next scene.
top left: Azuka Adindu. Enugu, Nigeria 2008
top centre: Casmiar Onyenwe. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
top right: Chigozie Nechi. Enugu, Nigeria, 2009
middle left: Chika Onyejekwe, Junior Ofokansi, Thomas Okafor. Enugu, Nigeria, 2009
middle centre: Chommy Choko Eli, Florence Owanta, Kelechi Anwuacha. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
middle right: Chris Nkulo and Patience Umeh. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom left: Clinton Ibeto. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom centre: Emeka Onu. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom right: Emeka Uzzi. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
All works C-type prints, 102 x 102cm, in an edition of 9
Tell me more about how you started this project.
While I was shooting the last part of The Hyena and Other Men, I shot one or two images on Nigerian film sets. I had some contacts in Nigeria and I started hanging around the sets taking some pictures. While I was there I met Gabazzini Zuo, who is a make-up artist; he started driving me around, introducing me to producers and actors, so I started taking portraits. But I didn’t feel that the pace at which things were moving was feasible to sustain a project, and secondly I wasn’t satisfied with my images.
So you started off taking photographs on existing movie sets?
Yes, I started with straightforward documentary photography. Yet, when I started photographing on the sets I was aware of the fact that I wanted to take photographs that would challenge the usual representations of Africa because you had these over-the-top characters in real homes and villages, the locations weren’t built-up movie sets and there was no artificial scenery. I thought that isolating the characters from the context and avoiding including the movie crew would be a very interesting way of subverting how Europeans or the Western world look at Africa.
What made this approach more powerful was the fact that the people I was portraying in stereotypical roles were actors, they are paid to be somebody else. By contrast, it would have been problematic if I had gone to a village and asked people who had never watched TV to impersonate horrid characters – I would obviously then be exploiting the financial and cultural dynamic.
When I complained to Gabazzini that I wasn’t getting the images I imagined, he showed me a portfolio of his work – he had worked on over 1000 movies! The snaps he showed me he had taken while preparing costumes and make-up, and they were amazing, they had exactly the edge I was looking for, they were in the spectrum I wanted to explore. I asked him to assist on this project: I had ideas about what I wanted to photograph and he provided the make-up and logistical support. He readily agreed, in part because he didn’t have any proper photographs of his work which he needed to go beyond the Nollywood industry and be accepted into foreign film schools.
So he is using your images as his portfolio as a make-up artist - this is great!
This also helped to involve his friends and entourage: they were very willing to feature in Gabazzini portfolio. Furthermore, as models and actors, they were getting paid. On my return a few months later, I didn’t think it was going to be such a big project. But I kept returning to these images and found them to be more and more powerful, so I decided to go back for a second time and take more of them. I then went back a third time, for a longer period, and now the project is finally resolved. In the process of constructing these images they became something very different from what could have been seen in the beginning as a quasi-documentation of Nollywood. This was the starting point but it evolved organically and a lot has to do with the process of making and taking them.
For instance, Gabazzini and I would meet at my hotel and decide which subject we would shoot the next day: let’s say a portrait of five guys with machine guns, who have just emerged from the dead. The next day no guys would arrive but three girls would show up without machine guns. So we would get into the car, go to the police and offer them some money to borrow their machine guns for half an hour. The location we wanted to photograph at wouldn’t be available anymore, so we ended up shooting outside the police station…. Another example: we would be photographing an actor as Jesus Christ and suddenly all the kids of the village would come and stand beside him, and the image became Jesus with a flock of children. In many ways the images evolved in a very different way to what I envisaged, which was very different from shooting a commissioned portrait in a location. You never know what you are going to get, you arrange the variables to try to articulate best what you want to say or see but it would invariably turn out in a very different way, it almost become a theatrical happening.
On many occasions the photographs didn’t work visually, but when one did it had an absolute magic about it. This is a different space from the notion of the ‘actuarial’ document that represents an account of the Nigerian film industry.
What I like in your explanation of the process is that your idea is modified by circumstances. It develops in different directions as the day passes by. Gabazzini had his own aesthetic that was heightened by interaction with the local reality. It’s not just you using it as a backdrop: it gets into your vision and it changes it.
I often thought that all I was doing was setting up a chain of events, serving as the initial input or sparkle that set these events into motion, and then there was some kind of conclusion, and I would photograph this conclusion.
Where does your initial sparkle come from: are your ideas a cross-pollination of Nollywood movies, paintings, books and things that you have seen?
A lot of my inspiration comes from literature, and a lot of inspiration for this project was sampled: I would walk around with a small digital camera wherever I was in the world and each time I saw something that caught my eye, or some kind of unnerving image or representation of Africa, I would take a snap, using it as starting point to get this project going. But as I said, often what my initial ‘sparkle’ was, and what I ended up with, were two very different things.
Did you find yourself at ease with this process?
Yes, and with this project, as Malcolm Smith from the ACP pointed out, what lends these images their power is the fact that they are the opposite of what a documentary photographer would normally do, that is to strip away excesses to reveal some coherent, accessible articulation of their subject. In this instance it’s embellished, it’s added on, it has become more garnished, it’s constructed. But it still relates to that experience in some way or another. I like the idea of placing something that sits in between spaces, that is hard to define. And maybe this is why I struggle to talk about it; I don’t really know where it fits: is it art, documentary, theatre? What is it? I don’t know the answers, and therein lies the energy of the images.
Maybe it is a bit of everything. Zina Saro-Wiwa wrote in the introduction to your book that “Nollywood films occupy an ambiguous realm that is between self-consciousness and naivety, between the hyper real and the totally unrealistic”. I think that your work can be described in the same way. In this, it is truthful to Nollywood although it is not taken directly from Nollywood movie scenes.
Yes, it doesn’t have any pretence of being a representation of the Nollywood industry.
How do you see this project in the general perspective of your work – how would it fit into a hypothetical retrospective 20 years from today?
When I set out to become a photographer I wanted to be a photographer: I didn’t know what this would entail and I didn’t care if I was doing advertising work, photojournalism, portraiture. As long as there were some elements of myself in those pictures, as long as there was some kind of honesty, I was happy. I think we have reached a stage in our understanding of photography in which we acknowledge that there’s no true objectivity in it. I have reached a personal conclusion on this debated issue, and I think it is evident in this project. I feel comfortable in switching from something that is photojournalism-based to something that is completely constructivist, because my preoccupations are the same throughout all my bodies of work, they are the thread that links all of them.
top left: John Mark. Asaba, Nigeria 2008
top centre: Kelechi Nwanyeali. Enugu, Nigeria, 2009
top right: Linus Okereke. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
middle left: Malachy Udegbunam with children. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
middle centre: Maureen Obise. Enugu, Nigeria, 2009
middle right: Mr Enblo. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom left: Ngozi Oltiri. Enugu, Nigeria, 2009
bottom centre: Obechukwu Nwoye. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom right: Omo Omeonu. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
All works C-type prints, 102 x 102cm, in an edition of 9
top left: Junior Ofokansi, Chetachi Ofokansi, Mpompo Ofokansi. Enugu, Nigeria 2008
top centre: Major Okolo and Do Somtin. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
top right: Dike Ngube and Gold Gabriel. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
row 2 left: Izunna Onwe and Uju Mbamalu. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
row 2 centre: Rose Njoku. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
row 2 right: Malachy Udegbunam. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
row 3 left: Pieter Hugo. Enugu, Nigeria, 2009
row 3 centre: Princess Adaobi. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
row 3 right: Song lyke with onlookers. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom left: Song lyke. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
bottom centre: Tarry King Ibuzo. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008
All works C-type prints, 102 x 102cm, in an edition of 9
