LONDON.- Shizaru Gallery welcomes 2012 with a solo show of Walter Hugo. Entirely self-taught, Hugoʼs ʻA Moment In An Instant Worldʼ is the culmination of Hugoʼs focus and deep exploration of obscure photographic systems. His studies have enabled technical feats that stand in stark contrast; as an antidote to the contemporary age of the instant, mass produced, and throwaway photography.
On display are three of Hugoʼs series that include his use of 19th century ambrotype photography as well as his self-invented process that exposes images directly onto walls and floors. These works highlight the deceptive nature of photography – a medium that claims to capture truth but instead alters that which is captured. Never knowing the image until its been developed, the precarious nature of Hugoʼs techniques produces a clash between control and chance that create artworks that linger in ambiguity.
Hugoʼs latest series, ʻTheoriesʼ, consist of twenty life sized glass plate portraits of models that adhere to ideals of Classical beauty. In this exploration Hugo captures the landscape of flesh – naked and raw – without the retouching associated with contemporary photography. For all of his glass plates, Hugo has massively scaled up the medium. He has purpose built a room-sized camera, housing a lens from 1890 and a laboratory within. This process consequently captures the most detailed renderings of any skin or surface, revealing pores, colourations, and imperfections in the skin, yet each one is phenomenally beautiful, drawing something ethereal from their subjects in a manner that is totally unique.
Part two of ʻTheoriesʼ plays upon the questions of individuality, re-production, and personal statements with a filmed performance that finds Hugo inking the walls of his room sized camera with renaissance tempera paint. The camera, covered with printed copies of his glass plates that were inked in the performance, will be on display in the lower gallery as well as a video that documents this performance.
'Reflecting The Bright Lightsʼ, Hugoʼs ongoing magnum opus is also partially exhibited. Here Hugo captures fifty of Londonʼs creative luminaries, highlighting their contemporary celebrity against the backdrop of 19th century glass plate photography. With subjects ranging from Fashion Designers, Musicians, and Actors, to Politicians, Astronauts, and Playwrights that include figures such as MIllie Brown, Eddie Redmayne, Natalie Derby, Charlie Casely-Hayford, and Oliver Sim, his method serves to eternalize ʻthe thick detail of London lifeʼ. Hugo offers a sense of timelessness in a world in which time is instant and gratification only a click away, drawing on an age when the photographic portrait was as unique and individual as its sitter.
Hugoʼs anthology 'Developing Shadows' is composed of works created with the extricated walls of his former East London studio before its demolishment. His self-discovered method sees Hugo developing images directly onto these walls. By painting silver nitrate emulsion and applying various chemicals that bleed from the image, Hugo unites the worlds of painting and photography. The highly personal photographic frescos that emerge on the walls evoke the artist populations of the East End and the romance of an idealized Bohemia as buildings housing studios are developed with such rapidity. The works are slightly over-exposed, giving the sense that the subject is emerging from the shadows of the building, a ghostlike incarnation.
Shizaruʼs programme of multidisciplinary artists has spanned an impressive breadth of talent thus far, with Hugo adding to this group. The technical and conceptual gravitas that Hugo displays has Shizaru founder Benjamin Khalili very pleased. ʻTo see artists in this modern society plunder the past in order to comment on the present adds dimension to their work, it intensifies their message in the most brilliant way. Hugoʼs creates artworks that are totally one-off and unique, subverting a medium that is most readily known for its inclination towards mass production.
Walter Hugo echoes this sentiment throughout his photographic works, making his collection an important part of Shizaruʼs exhibition programme. The personal connection to this method of photography is easily explained by Hugo. “I've always been fascinated with the original techniques of photography, and have collected ambrotypes and old cameras for years. The combination of the scientific complexities and the potential to explore something new with what is generally regarded as an ancient process is incredibly alluring.”
The idealistic beauty that the youngest generations have been exposed to is challenged by Hugoʼs method. Comparable to a Polaroid picture, capturing a distinctly ʻperfectʼ image is almost impossible with the ambrotype. A Moment In An Instant World is Hugoʼs latest body of work and draws attention to the opportunity to find beauty within this chance. The photographic medium creates a lot of surprises, rarely describing the world accurately, as one expects it to. Instead, photography transcends this expectation morphing our perceptions into something illusive, completely changing what it is describing. The art of photography is to control this transformation.
