Pieter Hugo
[Photographer, b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa, lives in Cape Town.]

 [Photography’s] true seduction lies in its foot in reality. It still has the pretense of being a quasi-document. 
 I’m interested in photography because it sits somewhere between document and art. 
 Photographs are like children, they grow, go about the world and no longer belong to you. 
 One of the things intrinsic to the medium of photography is that it’s inherently voyeuristic, and that’s what gives the medium a lot of energy. But it also creates problems that you have to solve. 
 For me to work at all as a photographer, I have to be conscious always of the problems acquired in what I do. I have to be conscious, if you like, of the impossibility of photography. 
 The picture takes 1/125th of a second. The photographer is always trying to compensate for that brevity, to extend the process. 
 Photography is finished. 
 In the process of working in any medium, at some stage, you become aware of its limitations. For me it was realizing that photography could only describe the surface of things. It’s symbolic. It can’t do much more than that.