Greetings dear Friend and Photographic Subject

Herewith an edit of my new portrait series. The subjects are all friends of mine who are either from South Africa or have made this country their home. I plan to publish the collection as a book in the next few weeks.If you feel uncomfortable with me exhibiting or publishing your image – now would be agood time to say so.

A brief description of what I have done to the images:

The colour process used in making these pictures involves turning the digital colour image to black and white, while keeping the colour channels active. In this manner one can manipulate the colour channels and bring certain colours to prominence as greyscales. The red and yellow colour channels were darkened to the point where nearly all information for these colours was rendered as blacks and dark grey. The pigment responsible for skin colour and appearance, melanin, which appears in two forms – pheomelanin (red) and eumelanin (very dark brown) – is brought to prominence in this colour process. As a result of exposure to UV rays the skin produces melanin to protectnuclear DNA from mutations caused by the sun’s ionizing radiation. The damage topeople’s skin caused by exposure to UV is thus shown up in their skin, along with capillaries and small blood vessels visible just under the skin.

Let me know your thoughts.

All my best,
Pieter Hugo