Pieter Hugo – The Journey

“I am 40 000 feet above the Atlantic ocean – mid-air, between Johannesburg and Atlanta. It is a 16-hour flight.
I cannot sleep. It seems as if everybody else in economy class is in some deep, troubled somnambulist state. Most have masks over their eyes and are shielded from any luminous intrusion.
I go for a walk to stretch my legs. Nine hours of flying left. I have almost reached the halfway mark of my journey. Will the second half go faster? Unlikely.
I am bored. I take my pocket camera with me. There is an infrared function on the camera. I make a few portraits of some of the sleeping passengers. Because the camera is photographing the infrared spectrum, no flash is needed. The subjects don’t know I am photographing them”.

Looking back at these images, apparently very immediate, allows the artist to reflect on various themes and events that have occurred in the previous decades, ranging from the war between Iraq and the United States to the technologies used to monitor citizens and to considerations around the concepts of time and space.