This Must Be The Place — Pieter Hugo, 2012

A mid-career retrospective in book form, This Must Be The Place surveys nearly a decade of Pieter Hugo’s photographic work across the African continent and beyond—from his early portraits in Nigeria’s Nollywood sets and Ghana’s techno scrapyards, to the still, unsettling frames of Rwandan genocide memorials and suburban South African interiors. Published on the occasion of his major 2012 exhibition at the Hague Museum of Photography and Musée de l’Elysée, the volume functions as both monograph and archive—a tightly edited body of images that trace Hugo’s evolving interest in postcolonial identity, theatricality, and the fragile architectures of power.

The cover image, a formal portrait of The Honourable Justice Unity Dow seated in full judicial regalia, sets the tone: this is Hugo at his sharpest—restaging colonial visual codes while revealing their contemporary resonance. Across the book, Hugo's signature frontality and saturated palette create a slow-burning tension between subject and setting. His images neither celebrate nor accuse. Instead, they maintain a precise, emotionally ambivalent distance that invites the viewer to sit in discomfort.

The book’s sequencing resists chronology in favour of affective proximity. A Liberian boy in face paint appears after a street performer in Lagos, followed by a quiet domestic portrait in Cape Town. This deliberate juxtaposition—of violence and banality, tradition and hyper-modernity—makes the book feel less like a survey and more like an index of contradictions. Hugo belongs in the lineage of Goldblatt and Dijkstra, but this book affirms his unique position: not as a documentarian of "Africa" but as an artist obsessed with its entanglements, illusions, and surfaces.

Technical Sheet
Title: This Must Be The Place
Artist / Author: Pieter Hugo
Date: 2012
Technique / Printing Method: Offset
Medium / Materials: Hardcover with dust jacket
Dimensions (cm): 29 × 29
Language: English
Pages: 224
Publisher / Editor: Prestel Verlag, Munich / London / New York
ISBN: 978-3-7913-4689-2
Condition: Near fine