HEROES OF THE STAGE
Hobart photographer and retired journalist Giles Hugo credits a love of live music with kickstarting his photographic career and now, 50 years later, musicians are still his favourite subject to shoot. His current solo exhibition at the Salamanca Arts Centre’s Nolan Gallery, Musical Heroes, performance photographs by Giles Hugo, features a selection of his most treasured musical experiences.
Hugo, 69, from New Town, has photographed the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Cliff, Ray Charles, Amanda Palmer and Leonard Cohen live in concert, but one of the South African born photographer’s most treasured images is of a man whose name he did not know.
“There was a blind man who would always be seen busking around Johannesburg, and I always remember seeing him at the end of the day walking home with his guitar and his cane, with a little boy walking beside him carrying his amp and a car battery,” he says.
“I took a photo of him in 1976, with a little kid in the foreground looking at him. I posted it on Facebook and several people commented saying they knew him, and someone told me his name was Depth Charge. So, some of my musical heroes, I don’t even know who they were.”
Hugo bought his first basic camera in 1968. While he was disappointed with the quality of his early shots, it made him realise he had a passion for it.
So, the following year, he upgraded to a proper SLR camera and, while studying at the University of Cape Town, he started going to as many rock concerts as he could, taking photos of the performers. Later, as a journalist, he was able to get better access to more concerts and his portfolio expanded.
He mainly shot on black and white film because he could not afford colour film. In a South Africa still divided by apartheid, Hugo says he was quite privileged to have been able to attend a lot of concerts in black areas where his fellow “whiteys” rarely ventured.
“I saw Jimmy Cliff perform at the Orlando Soccer Stadium in Soweto in 1980. He was this reggae pioneer singing songs like Get Up Stand Up in front of a crowd of about 20,000 black folks and only half a dozen whiteys in the whole audience.
“But I never experienced any aggro because we were whiteys coming to see a black hero perform, and that was okay.”
Hugo says his photography also gave him a much closer connection to the music he loves.
“I photographed Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend at their Rainbow concert (London, 1973) and I have that concert on CD now. So, whenever I listen to that now, I know I was there, in that room, I saw them on stage for myself, and the photos are my record of that. It is a kind of idolisation, yes, but also looking at real people, sometimes musical geniuses, doing real things.”
Hugo is working on an e-book that will feature a larger catalogue of his favourite images from the past 50 years.
Musical Heroes, performance photographs by Giles Hugo, is on show now in the Nolan Gallery, upper level, opposite The Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart