Commissioned initially during a fashion shoot in New York, the project began by accident—Hugo found himself more entranced by the street-cast polaroids pinned on a studio wall than by the seductive sheen of the final runway images. Those unvarnished portraits, “odd, queer, uncommon, atypical,” as Hugo muses, resonated with him on a deeper, more primal level.
Rather than amplify artifice, he stripped it back. Hugo traveled between London, Paris, New York, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, collaborating with Midland to scout models whose allure lay in their divergence from normative beauty. His instructions were simple yet radical: “Come in your own clothes… simply present yourself and look me in the eyes.” Some shed all clothing to convey unguarded vulnerability—others retained a posture laced with confidence and quiet idealism. The result: thirty-some portraits that feel less curated and more ritualistic, more evocation than depiction.
Hugo draws on classical myth to sharpen his meditation. Œdipus—“the one whose feet are swollen”—embodies a paradox: a “defect” becomes his means of insight. In Solus, the “deformity” is youth itself—its rebellion, uneven maturation, and rash idealism. These images don’t celebrate difference for its own sake; rather, they illuminate youth’s messy, thrilling in-between state—where agency and fragility collide.
As captured by art press retrospectively, Hugo’s shift in gaze marks a departure from the baroque tableaux of his previous series (like La Cucaracha or The Hyena & Other Men). Here, we encounter plain white backdrops, full-body nudity or steel-straight portraiture, and—crucially—a direct gaze. The photographer’s trust in voluntary vulnerability redefines portraiture as an exchange—between sitter and subject, photographer and viewer, stillness and intensity.
Solus also doubles as a critique of the fashion industry's commodification of youth. By photographing subjects pre-consumerist makeover, Hugo resists both beauty standards and exploitation. The resulting effect is visceral: raw humans, not brands. The typological study questions beauty systems and the impulse to homogenize while exalting the paradox at the heart of adolescence: the desire to belong and the need to be other.
A key lieutenancy in this aesthetic shift is Midland casting—led by Rachel Chandler and Walter Pearce—whose ethos aligns with Hugo’s: upend traditional beauty by foregrounding presences that would otherwise be erased. Chandler quips: “the kids we cast are the type who’d have got the shit beat out of them at his school in Midland, Texas,” a wry acknowledgement of outsider logic. This mismatched, raw youth—untamed, unfiltered—is precisely what Solus seeks to document. Not celebrating their difference, but honoring their singularities.
Luxury gallery Priska Pasquer exhibited Solus Vol. I in Cologne, Amsterdam, and across fair circuits, framing the series as typological cultural anthropology with emotional stakes. Critics have noted the paradoxical thrust: these portraits are forensic yet intimate, minimal yet immersive, brittle yet confident, compelling us to "hold their gaze" and feel something more than admiration .
Through Solus, Hugo confronts our assumptions: what constitutes beauty? Who gets to belong? And how do youth negotiate the twin desires for difference and acceptance? These images live in that crux—where asymmetry becomes magnetism, and presence, not polish, becomes grace.
