When a dream machine goes into overdrive, what happens to its dross? What forms do a community�s dreams take? Can the overflow be incorporated into everyday life? Dreams have only passing relationships to rational daily life, but dreams can also be manufactured in very intentional ways. Pieter Hugo addresses these dream issues by photographing elements of the machine that has grown up in Nigeria, the movie capital considered the third -wood after Holly and Bolly.

Anomaly is an old theme in photography, and in visual literacy in general; what doesn�t belong here? Anthropologically, our bearings are off in the real streets of Nollywood; I can�t say that I know what everyday life in Nigeria looks like. Despite the often rugged surroundings that provide context in Hugo�s images, I don�t know quite how far we are from the �factory floor� and thus how authentic or anomalous the views are. But most of Nollywood�s characters resemble dreams I�ve seen imaged elsewhere �spooks, ghouls, naked Darth Vaders, talcum-whitened youngsters playing in a field, a woebegone, uniformed, over-aged (miscast, so cast away?) Hamlet-cum-Emperor Jones* cradling Yorick�s skull in an expansive, roofless interior.




And one � count him, one � Caucasian amidst the Nigerians, the photographer himself, black-faced courtesy of a ski mask, wearing coroner�s rubber gloves, brown briefs, tattoos, and nothing else, wielding what might be an axe handle in an ambiguous pose of vulnerability and threat in the midst of a junkyard of pipes, sandbags, and other industrial detritus (I hope no Nigerian OSHA gets wind of these back-lot workspaces). Self-parody? Self-implication? Fraternity hazing? Hard to tell, and the delicate balance of real, surreal, and scripted is skewed by this act of bubble-bursting. Did Hugo volunteer as a walk-on, a psycho-killer alien for one of the thousands of direct-to-DVD productions generated by Nollywood each year? Did he �go native� and lose his objectivity? The power of dreams is truly awesome, but the critical realities of dreams and their functions in a socio-economically challenged environment are not to be trifled with.



Unless the volume is intended as a major critical retrospective, the more texts a �photography� book carries the more I grow concerned that the photographs leave significant content unsaid. Nollywood has three fine, distinctly crafted essays. Hmmm. —George Slade