Karoo: Long Time Passing - Obie Oberholzer

Condition: Very good, one name
Format: Big Square Hardcover
Published: 2013 (Jacana)
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9781431408351

Only the camera can do justice to those faces lined like road maps, the mocking eyes, the moments of hatred and joy, the harsh, grand, unforgettable landscapes. And modern South Africa has its master-painter, its poet laureate, in the work of Petrus Cornelius Jacobus Oberholzer, known from the sparse farms of the Karoo to the shebeens of the Lesotho border as Obie. Of farming stock himself - he was born outside Pretoria in the old Transvaal in 1947, the year before the formal introduction of the policy of apartheid - he studied at Stellenbosch University and then in Munich, and eventually became professor of photography at Rhodes University. Anyone less dully academic it would be hard to imagine.

His photographs make and break all the rules. He will wag a fierce set of lights intended for movie-shoots to and fro across some part of his subject while his camera is set on an immensely long exposure. Some pictures he snaps in an instant, others he takes hours to prepare. And he seems to spot effects that no one else ever does: weird cloud formations, mysterious groups performing unexplained tasks, and all those brooding, disturbed and sometimes inexplicably joyful people.

See the Karoo through his lens in this wonderful photographic record.