I’m divided,” says Obie Oberholzer. “The one oke represents this vagabond, casual guy. The other guy is very deep and sensitive.”
So, I ask, which side of him takes the photos?
“Both. It depends on the venue, depends on the situation. Besides using all the tricks in the book, I’m interested in sharing, communicating. I care about people. I’m what you call a humanist.”
That’s the deep side talking.
Oberholzer has just released his sixth book of photographs, The Hotazel Years (Double Storey). It collects images taken over the years, a sort of greatest hits album. It includes early, hitherto-unpublished black-and-white pictures from the 1970s, a surprise in an Oberholzer book because he is known for his photographs’ rich, saturated colours, for lighting effects that throw things into dreamlike relief.
The book also contains some new images, not seen before — mostly landscape images in which Oberholzer finds a piece that can stand for the whole. “You can’t convey from a big three-dimensional landscape to a two-dimensional print. I have to improvise, I have to reduce, confine, edit.”
He’s famous for his trips across Southern Africa, driving to doer en gone for a picture, or driving to doer en gone for the sake of it and finding the odd picture on the way. I imagine him driving along, seeing an old lady at the side of the road, screeching to a halt … Is that how it works?
“That’s how it works,” he says. “I don’t pre-plan situations. It’s in the journey. It’s the journey that counts, and the sharing of that. I love the thought of not knowing where I’m going. I’m good at seizing the moment.”
In that sense, he revels in the accidental, the unexpected. Yet many of his photographs have an air of loving contrivance, with elaborate set-ups that create complex compositions and light them in unusual ways. In such photographs, he seems as much the theatre director, even a sculptor with light, than a mere photographer. He refers to himself as a “visual director” — “I can seize on a situation and use it pictorially.” He wants, as he said, to be able to use “all the tricks in the book.
“Sometimes I take pictures, sometimes I make pictures,” he says.
For instance, there is a picture in The Hotazel Years of a back yard with some old rusted cars and a flock of geese moving past in a blur. I wonder how much “making” has gone into such a picture. Yes, he says, getting the geese herded past the cars was something he set up. “That is like making visual pleasure, for me. It’s not a deeper-meaning kind of picture. It’s been engineered. The actors are old cars and geese that we shove along. Tongue-in-cheek, yes — but it’s a challenge to me to see if I can do that.”
He doesn’t want to see himself as a photojournalist or as an art photographer, he says.
“I photograph what I love and maybe art will follow.” But in fact there are both in Oberholzer, like the casual oke and the sensitive deep guy. There is the high level of artfulness in many pictures, but there are also people who could never have been contrived, who are there in all their own peculiar particularity.
Like his picture of Jan Golly, grinning at the camera, with his hands in the foreground — hands that have seen a lifetime’s hard labour, the skin calloused and the nails chipped in a way that can only make a white city boy like me wince.
But what remains in the mind, beyond that little piece of documentary realism, is the care that has been lavished on this portrait; it seems to contain the whole history of an encounter, and to make a kind of star of an ordinary person. “Maybe I’m weak there — I don’t show enough of the sadness,” he says. “I make Jan Golly look like a hero, man.”
In the best of the photographs, all the Obies are there — casual guy and deep guy, seize-the-moment guy and set-it-all-up-meticulously guy. They interact in different ways in different photographs. The one Obie who’s always there, though, is visual guy.
In the early black-and-whites, there is an air of informality, of a surreptitiously captured moment, Ã la Cartier-Bresson. But there is also an eye for an off-beat composition. In the later pictures, the most obviously “engineered”, there is a richness that gives pleasure and a playfulness that is very engaging. Oberholzer doesn’t try to hide his “tricks”; he revels in them.
“Trickster, yes, bullshitter, yes — but there is that concern about the country, the outback, the people there. I talk with my eyes.”