Premanent Error

Rubbish. Trash. Refuse. Garbage. Junk. Litter.


Pieter Hugo, 'Premanent Error', 2010 

For the past year Hugo has been photographing the people and landscapes of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. The area of a slum called Agbogbloshie, is reffered to by local inhabitants as Sodom and Gomorrah, a vivid acknowledgment of profound inhumanity of the place. When Hugo asked the inhabitants what they called the pit where the burning takes place, they responded:

‘For this place, we have no name’.

In those more or less posed portraits he shows shocking 3^rd World, where people are burning electronic waste to get precious metals as a copper for example. This toxic fumes they create endanger both their own health and the environment.

Today’s electronic gadgetry is near obsolete within two to three years, creating some 50 million metric tonnes of e-waste per year. Much of that techno-trash is sold and (kind of) recycle in China, Nigeria, India, Vietnam and Ghana.

Photographs are carefully composed and cropped. Hugo spend long hours to get everything ready before the shot and after, he’s not using any graphic manipulations, but still his pictures looks ridiculously unreal. He shows different Africa, which is not a shock for him, cause he grown up there. Is a shock for European people who basically produce this waste.