Pieter Hugo’s There’s a place in hell for me & my friends is a series of close-up portraits of the artist and his friends, all of whom call South Africa home. Through a digital process of converting colour images to black and white while manipulating the colour channels, Hugo emphasizes the pigment (melanin) in his sitters’ skins so they appear heavily marked by blemishes and sun damage. The resulting portraits are the antithesis of the airbrushed images that determine the canons of beauty in popular culture, and expose the contradictions of racial distinctions based on skin colour.
As the critic Aaron Schuman writes, “although at first glance we may look ‘black’ or ‘white’, the components that remain ‘active’ beneath the surface consist of a much broader spectrum. What superficially appears to divide us is in fact something that we all share, and like these photographs, we are not merely black and white – we are red, yellow, brown, and so on; we are all, in fact, coloured.”
There’s a place in hell for me & my friends
Pieter Hugo
oodee Editions
144 pages, 96 photographs
23.5 x 28.2 cm
1000 copies
Hardcover with a tipped-in photo
Oodee: An Indepdent Publishing House
Oodee is a publishing house specializing in contemporary photography, founded in 2011 by Damien Poulain, an artistic director based in London.
Oodee began with the project POV Female, which featured the work of young women photographers between the ages of 20 and 40. The project resulted in the publication of five monographs devoted to five young women in five different cities across the world: London in 2011, Tokyo in 2012, Johannesburg in 2013, then Buenos Aires and New York.
Following its success, in November 2011, I published Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide by Pieter Hugo and Linda Melvern. Despite its difficult subject matter, the book met with great success and quickly sold out.
The two most recent titles published this year (November 2012) are Pieter Hugo’s There is a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends and Viviane Sassen’s Roxane. The runs of both titles are almost entirely sold out.
Oode’s focus is limited-edition luxury books that nonetheless remain affordable. I still think that the printed book has a long future ahead of it as long as we take time to make the books themselves beautiful.
Damien Poulain
oodee
The Print House
18 Ashwin Street
London E8 3DL
UK
T. +44 (0)793 194 3054
