Pieter Hugo, "Permanent Error"

The South African photographer, whose color portraits have brilliantly illuminated the brutal effects of globalism on the people and environment of his native continent, offers a searing new series focusing on a garbage dump outside Ghana's capital city. There, inhabitants "recycle" technology hardware—computers, cell phones, etc.—by burning the plastic housing of such devices to extract rare metals. Pausing amid columns of toxic smoke rising into the sky, Hugo's subjects face the camera in a reminder of the human cost behind the supposed benefits of the information revolution.