Filled with startling portraits of Africa's raw and tragic beauty, this first retrospective of Pieter Hugo's award-winning work collects the most important images from the photographer's career to date. Pieter Hugo has been documenting his native continent of Africa since his late teens. An autodidact, he was eventually drawn to portraiture, an interest that culminated with his hugely popular book, The Hyena and Other Men. Since that book, Hugo has continued to earn high praise while testing the limits of the traditional portrait. As Aperture magazine observes, 'Hugo maneuvers through the muddy waters of political engagement, documentary responsibility, and the relationship of these to his own aesthetic.' In the books Nollywood and Permanent Error he suffuses a journalist's perspective and a voyeur's theatricality into images of Africa's people and environment. This retrospective volume collects photographs from each of his earlier series as well as portraits and landscapes that have never been shown or published before. Essays by three esteemed photographic critics contextualize Hugo's career Hugo's career within the realm of contemporary photography. Full-page color illustrations highlight Hugo's extraordinary talent for teasing out the subtleties in otherwise stark images.

The most recent publication from the award-winning photographer Pieter Hugo reveals the devastating consequences of toxic waste on one community in Africa. In his previous well-received volumes of photographs, Hugo offers unflinching yet striking portraits of humans, animals, societies, and landscapes that shock and disturb, but also demand our attention. In Permanent Error, he documents a garbage dump in Ghana that has become the repository for discarded computers from around the world. These haunting images document the true cost of a misguided policy-the shipping of millions of tons of obsolete computers to developing countries. The computers are burned to extract valuable metals, effectively turning the site into a toxic wasteland that contaminates air, soil, and groundwater for miles around. These amazing portraits tell a story of a marginal community overwhelmed by poverty, but where human strength and resilience shine through the inhuman conditions Hugo lays bare.