Diesel and Dust
By Obie Oberholzer
(Jacana, R450)
One of the things that first struck me about Obie Oberholzer’s photography when I first saw it some 10 years ago was his use of colour.
Colour throbbed in his pictures, with a vividness I had never seen before. Today, Photoshop makes it easy to boost vibrance and hues in a photograph; the patience and intricate knowledge of chemicals that was demanded of professional photographers who worked in a darkroom are now anachronistic.
So before viewing this, his latest photographic journal, which tracks his journeys across the southern (Botswana, Namibia, SA) and northern tip of Africa (Egypt, Yemen, Egypt), I wondered if modern technology had essentially robbed him of his palette.
I needn’t have worried. The man’s talent is boundless. The colour is still there, of course, and the rich detail, and, so far as I know, Oberholzer is still shooting on medium format film rather than using digital technology but, whereas many photographers use Photoshop to the maximum in order to make colours “pop”, especially in fashion shoots, Oberholzer’s colours seem embedded in his pictures rather than make-up that has been thickly applied on after the event.
You can study a photo layout in a fashion magazine, and the detail and the colours will “pop” but the images will somehow look cold. Oberholzer’s photos pulsate with life.
His photos tell a story, be it a sangoma in traditional attire laughing while using a payphone as his stocky wife occupies the foreground, arms folded and frowning, or welcoming Christmas decorations peeping through electrified razor wire. There is, throughout the photographer’s work, a lust for life. He looks for things that make him breathe.
Most professional photogra-phers develop a certain style, or focus on a specific subject, so producing work that is specific to them, a signature. Oberholzer’s roving eye, however, is utterly promiscuous. He photographs people, patterns, landscapes, architecture, everything and anything. Even things that shouldn’t be aesthetic, like flies crawling over an elephant carcass become, through his eye, something wondrous.
In every portrait in this book, there is the utmost respect for the person inside his viewfinder. It’s as if his eyes are mouths that feed on the world, and looking through this smorgasboard of images, you feel as if a door has cracked open, and you become aware of a world that you have yet to explore, of people you have yet to meet, you become aware of a life, thick as honey, you have yet to taste.