Walter Hugo’s New York Debut

Carrie Scott Represents is pleased to present Walter Hugo’s first solo exhibition in New York, Implicit : Explicit, in association with Turnbull & Asser. Running from April 4 to May 11, 2013, at The Sixth Floor, the exhibition brings together Hugo’s experimental photographic techniques, combining science, sculpture, and historical processes to challenge the way we engage with portraiture and materiality.

Walter Hugo: Reimagining Early Photography

A London-based artist, Walter Hugo is known for his multi-disciplinary approach, reviving 19th-century photographic techniques while pioneering their modern development. His work extends beyond photography into sculpture, performance, and film, with a focus on the human condition, memory, and transformation.

Hugo’s practice resists the high-gloss perfection of contemporary photography, instead embracing imperfection and materiality. His works - spanning ambrotypes, tintypes, salt prints, and pigment prints - bear the physical marks of their own making. His evolved photographic processes allow for an unparalleled depth and texture, where silver nitrate washes across haunting portraits and salt deposits leave traces of the sea within the composition.

By using the subject as an active participant in the creation of the image, Hugo’s work engages with ideas of reincarnation, process, and the ephemeral nature of existence.

Walter Hugo: Implicit : Explicit

Curated By Carrie Scott

The Series

Implicit : Explicit features four interrelated series, all of which celebrate the subject as both a visual and material presence.

Theories: A Study of Time and Presence

Hugo’s glass plate ambrotypes present an intense, unfiltered study of the sitter. Subjects hold their position for 18 to 20 seconds, a stark contrast to the instantaneous snapshot of digital photography. The prolonged exposure captures a landscape of expression, revealing raw vulnerability and focus.

Traditional beauty is stripped of artifice, revealing a new kind of intimacy and strength.
Men appear pared down and exposed, their presence unembellished yet deeply expressive.

Iconostatus: A Gilded Tribute to Street Culture

Created during a three-month residency at London’s East End gallery, Four Corners, Iconostatus is a series of hand-painted, gilded portraits celebrating the diverse communities of the East End.

Inspired by religious iconography, each portrait is transformed into a reverential object, elevating the status of individuals who are often misrepresented or overlooked.
Hugo redefines street portraiture, fusing historical techniques with contemporary identity.

Life With: Objects as Portraits

For the first time, Hugo turns his lens toward objects rather than people, using discarded chairs as metaphors for human life cycles.

Broken chairs, collected from across the UK, are taken to a remote Scottish forest - one of the darkest places in the world.
Set on fire in the dead of night, each chair becomes its own ephemeral light source, illuminating the surrounding darkness.
The ashes of the chairs are used to make the very paper on which the photographs are printed, ensuring that each image is physically tied to the history of its subject.
The limited number of prints is dictated by the amount of paper created from each chair, reinforcing the themes of impermanence and renewal.

The Nature of Interdependence: The Ocean in Print

In this series, Hugo incorporates the sea into the photographic process itself.

At specific coastal sites across the UK, Hugo collects ocean water from the precise location he photographs.
The water is distilled and recombined to create salt prints, producing images physically made from the environment they depict.
The result is a self-contained ecosystem of image and material, where the ocean both exists within and represents itself.

Reimagining Photography as a Physical Experience

Walter Hugo’s Implicit : Explicit embodies a relentless pursuit of tangible, time-bound photography. Each series explores the relationship between subject and medium, where the photograph is more than an image - it is a physical artifact, shaped by its own making.

Through his innovative approach to materiality and process, Hugo challenges us to reconsider the role of photography in contemporary art, asking:

Can a photograph be both a record and a reincarnation?
What happens when the subject becomes part of the photographic material itself?
How does the act of creation mirror the impermanence of life?

In Implicit : Explicit, Hugo presents a body of work that is as much about process as it is about perception, transforming the act of photography into a ritual of preservation, destruction, and renewal.