Photographer Obie Oberholzer’s latest exhibition captures a lifetime of following the dream . . .
Five months ago I looked back at the swirling dust behind my bakkie and saw a big 70 dancing into the distance. I was born in 1947, on a farm north of Pretoria. I wanted to fight communist world domination in Vietnam, but was drafted into the South African Air Force. All I did there was accidentally almost shoot the sergeant-major at target practice. So I had to spend a few days in DB, detention barracks.
During this time of total darkness I recited all the Elvis songs that I remembered. Actually, I started by singing them, but the guard on duty outside said that I must recite them. When I started reciting Bob Dylan, the guard told me that if the sergeant-major heard that he would give me an extra day in detention. Why? Because Bob Dylan was a communist. I told the guard that there was a communist hiding behind every
bossie in South Africa in 1967. “How come?” the guard asked. Because the sergeant-major said that the government said so.
Then I went to Stellenbosch University. Why? Because I was white and could nearly run the mile in under four minutes. Here I helped make Tassies wine famous. I failed history of art in my final exams. Why? Because I tried to run the mile in under four minutes. And I womanised too much and drank too much Tassies.
I studied photography for many years in Munich, then lectured in photography for even more years at the old Durban Technikon and at Rhodes University. For 17 years I spelt it “Roads University” so the admin staff would not give me any external duties to perform. For 17 years they thought I was dof.
For most of my years I have searched for images of the weird, the haphazard and the wondrous. I have chased landscapes in distant lands and strange places. Finding images is the everlasting song in my heart.
The theme of this exhibition is all about the people and places that make up the long road I have travelled.
I follow no current photographic styles and speak seldom about art. Things happen like this: on a barrier along the road to Ladismith just outside Calitzdorp stands a little boy waving his arms. His name is Elden Lewis. “What are you doing?” I ask. “I can fly,” he answers.
Like Elvis Presley sang so many years ago: “You’ve gotta follow that dream, wherever that dream may lead you.”
In 1992, while on assignment for a German magazine in the US, I made a detour to visit the venue of the most famous festival of love and music ever held on Planet Earth: Woodstock 1969. It was held on a dairy farm in the Catskill hills near the town of Bethel, New York state. On the balcony of the River Edge Lodge, I collided with a set of moments that remain, to this day, surreal and uncanny.
This young couple told me they had both been conceived at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, which both their sets of parents had attended. The young man was named John after John Fogerty, the lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the young girl was called Janis, after Janis Joplin.
Between the kissing and the hugging and the loving, the gentle rustling of the trees and the flowing of Ten Mile Creek, I managed the mundane act of photographing them. They were held close by evening’s cool ambient light, lit by a warm light bulb that poured love from an open door. John and Janis had only been married for a few weeks and had come to Woodstock to love each other in the hope that their first child would be conceived here.
Long after they had gone to their room, I sat in the peace of the night, thinking of the lines of fate and chance that intersect those who love. In 1969, half a million people chanted “just one more song”. I look at this image now, after so many years, and wish that I were back there on that balcony for just one more song.
Iam the relentless hunter-gatherer for any edible image, the walkabout street gobbler, the searcher for the quick moment of unpredictability, the rhythm of the odd, the one-liner of the haphazard and the spoiler of the picture perfect. I am inadequately prepared to capture anything but a small sliver of this vast and huge world, just a grain of sand, walking this endless human beach.
Man was made to walk, so I walk. My camera is my white walking stick; it touches the way I should go. My hope still springs eternal in the search, and I dream that I will get what I came for, slivers of light and moments that stay just a short while longer.
This was my second day in the Cuban city of Santa Clara, the town of the revolutionaries, place of the final battle against Batista’s dictatorship and the memorial monument to the eternal
Cuban hero, Ché Guevara.
Big words on paper do not help to conjure up that short exposure which balances light, line and shape. Yet, in that lies a photographic contradiction. Sometimes, the offbeat and life’s rough edges help to poise the balanced. I am the unbalanced man holding the balanced machine, the camera.
I am actually thinking this whilst walking down Avenida de los Desfiles to Boulevard Independencia (the way between one Ché monument and another Ché monument). My assistant, walking a distance ahead, looks nice and balanced carrying my Manfrotto tripod. She’s an awfully balanced person, neatly poised, carrying my truly well-balanced Italian machine. I tell her the bit about the unbalanced using the balanced. She sighs, rolls her eyes with a half smile and says, “You were totally unbalanced last night after that half jack of rum.” So you see, in front of every man is a great woman.
I search on without walking the talk. In all the Cuban cities, people live on the streets, cheek by jowl. Their close proximity to each other brings warmth and passion and atmosphere and love and sadness and happiness right there onto the pavements. I am walking through life.
Pavements are to Cubans what malls are to Americans, just that most Americans look to buy and the Cubans look to see. Their small living rooms overflow like iced cakes and puddings onto the streets. Old dented fans chop at the thick air; kitsch ornaments shine and the state-run television flickers the great Cuban lifestyle against cracked walls.
Outside his front door, José has his greasy head beneath the bonnet, working on the Russian diesel engine in his 1948 Chevrolet Fleetmaster. The beautiful car stands, kept alive with everything hybrid. I greet an old man on the pavement, called Rafael. He cuddles a baby rabbit. I conjure a picture, mime a question: may I? He smiles, I take. Then I walk on, saddened with a smile.