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Hugo’s work is governed by an autodidactic approach to photography and a deep scepticism of the role of the photographic medium. He is one of a generation of post-Apartheid photographers that seeks to confront photography’s history of representing marginalised and disempowered people. His work aims to challenge preconceptions around the representation of groups of people ‘other’ to the Western European norm.

Hugo is a regular contributor to titles such as the New Yorker, Zeit magazine, Le Monde and The New York Time’s magazine. He has written extensively about his own work and that of other photographers with his article on Garth Walker being featured in Aperture magazine, Winter, 2013. In May 2015 he was invited to guest edit the supplement DeLuxe for the Dutch newspaper NRC.nl.

Pieter Hugo has exhibited extensively in various countries. He has had major museum solo exhibitions at the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal (2018), the Museum für Kuns und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund, Germany (2017), the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2017), The National Portrait Gallery, London (2015), the Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2013), the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2010), the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2012) and the South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2007).

He has been included on important group exhibitions such as Civilization: The Way We Live Now at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea (2018), Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, England (2018), Good Hope. South Africa and The Netherlands from 1600 at the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands (2017), Street & Studio: An urban history of photography at the Tate Modern, London, UK (2008), reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow at the DeVos Art Museum, Marquette, Michigan, USA (2008) and How to Live Together, 27th São Paulo Biennale, Brazil; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Santiago, Chile (2006) among many others.

Flat Noodle Soup (2016) chronicles Hugo’s lengthly engagement with the city of Beijing, exploring how concerns with expressing personal identity within societal norms and pressures are universal and trans-national.

In the Spring of 2014, Hugo was commissioned by Creative Court to work in Rwanda for its "Rwanda 20 Years: Portraits of Forgiveness" project. The project was displayed in The Hague in the Atrium of The Hague City Hall for the 20th commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A selection of the photos have also been displayed in New York at the exhibition Post-Conflict which was curated by Bradley McCallum, artist in residence for the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. The project served as the impetus for the photographic series 1994 (2017) which explores the post-revolutionary era in both South Africa and Rwanda through a series of portraits of children from both countries.

In 2011 Hugo collaborated with Michael Cleary, co-directing the music video for South African musician Spoek Mathambo's cover version of Joy Division's "She's Lost Control". For the video, Hugo won the Young Director Award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In 2015 he directed the music video for "Dirty", a song by controversial South African musical artists Dookoom.

Hugo has had four monographs published on his career. These include Pieter Hugo: The Hyena and Other Men (2008) by Aaron Schuman published by the Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Pieter Hugo: Selected Works (2009) edited by the Área De Cultura / Ajuntament de Tarragona; This Must Be the Place (2012) with essays by TJ Demos and Aaron Schuman, published by Prestel: Munich; and Pieter Hugo: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (2017) with essays by the editors, Ralf Beil and Uta Ruthkamp, published by Prestel: Munich.

His series Messina/Mussina (2007) was made in the town of Musina on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa, after Colors magazine asked Hugo to work on an AIDS story. Nollywood (2009) consists of pictures of the Nigerian film industry. For Permanent Error (2011) Hugo photographed the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. There is a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends (2012) depicts Hugo’s family and friends from South Africa in digitally manipulated black and white portraits that aim to explore the contradictions of racial classification based on skin colour. Kin (2014) places even greater emphasis on the photographer’s family and community which Hugo describes as “an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being ‘colonial driftwood’.”

Hugo's first major work Looking Aside (2006) depicts portraits of people "whose appearance makes us look aside" – the blind, people with albinism, the aged, his family and himself. Each man, woman and child poses in a sterile studio setting, under crisp light against a blank background. His Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide (2011) was described by the Rwanda Genocide Institute as offering "a forensic view of some of the sites of mass execution and graves that stand as lingering memorials to the many thousands of people slaughtered." Hugo's most recognized work is The Hyena & Other Men (2007), which has received a great deal of attention.

Pieter Hugo (born 1976) is a photographer who primarily works in portraiture and whose work considers the role of photography between documentary and art traditions with a focus on peripheral communities. He lives in Cape Town.

Hugo was born 1976 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He began his career working in the film industry in Cape Town, before undertaking a two-year residency at Fabrica research centre, Treviso, Italy.