[1] He began his career working in the film industry in Cape Town, before undertaking a two-year residency at Fabrica research centre, Treviso, Italy.
[13] In 2011 Hugo collaborated with Michael Cleary, co-directing the music video for South African musician Spoek Mathambo's cover version of Joy Division's "She's Lost Control".
[19][22] His series Messina/Mussina (2007) was made in the town of Musina on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa,[23] after Colors magazine asked Hugo to work on an AIDS story.
[25] Kin (2014) places even greater emphasis on the photographer's family and community[26] which Hugo describes as "an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being 'colonial driftwood'.
Hugo prefaces the work which was presented both as an exhibition (2014) and newspaper format publication (2015)[28] with a reflective monologue on the way that infrared images from the first invasion during the Iraq War have shifted associations with the medium from wildlife photography to conflict zones, and how contemporary surveillance has effectively challenged notions of the privacy and ownership of one's representation.
[34][35] Flat Noodle Soup (2016) chronicles Hugo's lengthy engagement with the city of Beijing, exploring how concerns with expressing personal identity within societal norms and pressures are universal and trans-national.
[29] The photographic series explores Hugo's perception of the flamboyant and violent environment of Mexico with overt art historical references to the nation's visual canon of precolonial customs and revolutionary ideology.