The big picture: Pieter Hugo’s swaggering truck driver

Pieter Hugo was on assignment in Kano, northern Nigeria, in 2023 when he spotted this young man driving a truck and asked to take his photo. “He had such a fantastic style,” Hugo recalls, “such swagger and self-confidence.” Time was tight – the driver was ferrying extras to the set of a music video for the rapper Travis Scott, while Hugo shot artwork for Scott’s album Utopia – but they paused long enough for Hugo to grab two portraits, one in the cab and one outside the truck. The young man was “super-cool” about the request, says Hugo. “He totally knew he had it going on.”

It was the South African’s second visit to Kano. On his first, two decades earlier, he was photographing the so-called “hyena men” who roam northern Nigeria with hulking hyenas on leashes – the resulting images, published in The Hyena & Other Men, made Hugo’s name when it came out in 2007. The place left an imprint on him, he says, not least because he went during the Harmattan season, “when winds from the Sahara blow dust over west Africa and create this diffused light, this desaturated look that really resonated with me. I always wanted to go back – it’s one of the most interesting places I’ve been to.”

It wasn’t Harmattan on his 2023 visit and this portrait is cleaner and more colour-saturated as a result, though much of the colour is brought by the young driver, with his fantastic hat adorned with a dandyish sprig of pink silk flowers. The long stick in his mouth is a miswak, a twig from Salvadora persica, or the toothbrush tree, commonly used in northern Nigeria and other parts of Africa for cleaning teeth.

The image is part of Hugo’s series What the Light Falls On, which is showing at the Kyotographie festival in Japan. Drawing on 23 years of material from his archive, and bookended by images of birth and death, it looks at life from the gentler perspective of middle age. Gone are the harsh edges of the hyena men; in this style-conscious young truck driver, Hugo finds a more tender view of west African life.

What the Light Falls On by Pieter Hugo is at the Kyotographie photography festival, Kyoto, until 17 May