PH & HBA

Pieter Hugo
PH & HBA

Photographs: Pieter Hugo

Text: Pieter Hugo & Carlos Nazario

Publisher: See W

56 pages

Year: 2016

Comments: Softcover, sewn binding, 380 x 295 mm. First edition, 2016. Text in english. Design by Joseph Burrin.

In early 2016, Pieter Hugo travelled to Jamaica to shoot a series of portraits of a street cast wearing seminal pieces of the HBA archive. The cast included male porn stars and Gully Queens, a vilified gay community in Kingston who live in a gully (or drain) beneath the city.

The book includes an in-conversation essay between Hugo and Carlos Nazario, collaborator on the project and a long time collaborator and friend of Hood by Air’s founder Shayne Oliver. They discuss the challenges they faced photographing such sexually ambiguous characters in a country where homosexuality is still illegal. The conversation is informative and personal and reveals something of the tension they felt during the process of making this fascinating body of work.