'Hughes' realism is almost a hyper-realism: a lowly bit of detritus is transformed into a monumental and disturbing sculpture. His photograph of a once prosaic blue plastic bottle, for example, somehow manages to chip away at the status of that bottle. It's the intense low angle from which it is photographed that suggests its enormous scale; it's the lighting and the tenor of the shots, and the saturation of colour in the developing of the images that combine to remove the object from its previous function and ascribe the piece of rubbish a formal significance: the bottle becomes abstract art.

But the waste is never transformed entirely. Its previous identity is always in view. Hughes challenges his own formal aesthetic because he also wants us to be aware of the object as waste. The rubbish is political and social; it speaks of industrial excess, of responsibility (or the lack of it). The photographs are "a sinister beautification of the visual culture of contamination"

Dr Chris Short - Lecturer in History and Theory of Art
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff









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