A decade ago I walked into the old hotel in Brandfort in the Free State and was welcomed by photographer Paul Alberts.
After introductions — he had renovated the place into a wonderful home for his wife, Charmaine, and their children — he picked out a CD from the many racks on the wall and settled back into an optimally positioned chair.
Having only just met him, I found it unusual that he leaned back and closed his eyes, as though he was alone, as Bob Dylan blared forth, far louder than was necessary, I thought, but try telling that to a Dylan fan.
Other than music, Alberts loved fast cars and planes. He drove me to Bloemfontein at high speed the next day in his fine silver BMW to see some of his pictures (after first checking with Charmaine if the police were out speed trapping that day — they were, just past the big trees) and explained he’d got the car for next to nothing because it had a ‘dead cylinder” that had been easily repaired.
He was the kind of photographer that other photographers love.
Working mainly in black and white, he photographed many of the personalities of the Sixties and Seventies with an integrity that sought to reveal something of the person’s character.
Alberts died from pancreatic cancer on November 18 last year and, since our meeting in 2001, had organised an exhaustive exhibition and published books on the Anglo-Boer War.
David Goldblatt, probably South Africa’s most famous photographer, remembers first meeting Alberts while he was working for the arts pages of Die Burger in Cape Town in the Seventies. They became very good friends.
‘I was critical of his photography, or rather of his printing [Goldblatt contended his printing was too dark]. ‘It was an old argument we used to have, partly joking, partly real.”
It was Alberts who published Goldblatt’s now famous book, In Boksburg.
‘Let me go back in time — it was in 1971 and I was wondering who are the whites of South Africa,” says Goldblatt. ‘I had a good relationship with the editor of Optima and I suggested to him that he do a [photo] essay. The idea lay dormant for a few years and then in 1979 I was told that Alan Paton would write the essay. I had been doing photographs in Boksburg, purely for myself, and now I planned to go off on my motorbike around the country, looking at whites in South Africa — but then I realised that Boksburg was a microcosm of the country.”
Goldblatt completed the project in 1980, by which time the editor of Optima had changed and the ‘new editor didn’t like my views. He paid for it, but didn’t use it.
‘Paul became angered by this. He then became — and this was typical Paul Alberts — completely enamoured by the idea of publishing photographic books and establishing a press [The Gallery Press] to do so. There were very few photographic books available and they were badly distributed.
‘He thought there would be quite a big audience who would be interested in photographic books, which he planned to distribute by post. Working by extrapolation — which is often how he worked — he worked out the profits would be X and therefore it would be viable.
‘He bloody nearly went bankrupt. I don’t know what he did — he probably borrowed money. That was the typical modus operandi of Paul Alberts.
‘We shared a lot. He was also an extraordinarily passionate and compassionate person. Both of these qualities got him into a lot of trouble and led him to do a lot of good things.
‘He liked to believe the best of people. He would be guaranteed by some organisation that they would take several hundred copies of his books. And he worked on that basis and worked out he could break even — but later he would find the secretary had been sacked for having his hand in the till and he would be left holding the stocks.
‘In his later years he became not an Afrikaner nationalist but an Afrikaner patriot. He became deeply engrossed in the trials and tribulations of the Afrikaner people in the Anglo-Boer War.”
Frik Jacobs, a now retired director of the War Museum in Bloemfontein, met Alberts when he approached him seeking permission to mine the museum’s thousands of photographs dealing with the war, which grew into an exhibition and later a book.
Jacobs remembers that Alberts curated a ‘very huge exhibition”, digitally improving many of the prints and enlarging others, some up to two metres.
‘I learned about his terrific passion for people who suffer, especially women and children. He was an artist and he always got emotionally involved in his work. [With Alberts] it wasn’t just going to the office, he was really moved by the images.
‘I remember him in his studio, sitting with a photograph. He was enhancing a print of a small girl in a concentration camp — she was on the point of dying. He was working on [the image of] her toe and there were tears running down his face.
‘He was emotionally touched by his subject. It was more than a job; it was a calling. There was a tendency in Paul to look more for suffering. You would never find him on the beach taking pictures of children playing in the surf.
‘His work centred on old people, sick people, people in dire straits. For that reason the photographs of the Anglo-Boer War and the concentration camps touched him immensely. ‘He never searched for fame; he let his photographs speak. He also never got into competition with other publishers — he just put a book on the table that was better.”
Alberts formed Kraal publishing house in about 2004 and produced a book called Suffering of War, which showed Boer fighters, women and children, as well as the destructive effect the war had on infrastructure, livestock and even the environment.
Photojournalist Cloete Breytenbach, another friend, had known Alberts for so long that it was almost from ‘another life”. Like Goldblatt, they met in Cape Town in the Seventies while he was at Die Burger.
‘He was a very honest man, an honest photographer. He contributed a hell of a lot to the history of this country. He was very convinced in what he was doing. He had no hidden agenda.
‘It was a pity that he died, only now was he getting into his stride. He still had a lot to do.
‘Twenty-seven thousand died in concentration camps and that was the sort of thing that Paul would never let go unnoticed. It was a damn good thing that he uncovered those thousands of negatives in Bloemfontein. They didn’t know what they had. He could see it was a gold mine of history and he uncovered it.”
Author André Brink remembers first meeting Alberts in Pretoria in the early days of his career in the Sixties and recalls that he was more interested in painting.
Brink in fact owns a painting by Alberts of a mother and child, which he says is heavily influenced by expressionism.
‘I was very interested in photography and he [Alberts] thought about moving out of photography. I took over all his equipment but then he asked, if I didn’t mind, he would like to have them back. I’m very glad in view of what he did later. He became one of the top photographers in the country.”
Brink says, although he was not sure what Alberts’s political sentiments were, his work on the Anglo-Boer War has proved to be invaluable.
‘I was a little bit worried that in order to set the record straight he moved over a bit too strongly to the traditionalist Afrikaner attitude. I can understand his reasoning, of setting that record straight, and he did that very forcefully.
‘He slightly overstated the case, but it was imperative that a balanced view about the war should be set straight. The Afrikaners in that war were hopelessly outnumbered, outgunned. In view of what has happened since then in the world it was an immensely important part of history.”
Brink says that, although South Africa was a small corner of the world, concentration camps were established here roughly at the same time they were established in what was then South West Africa.
‘The South African [war] became immensely important in view of what happened later in Germany. Paul was someone who helped set the record straight.”
Charmaine will always remember her husband’s obsessive fight for the underdog. ‘He couldn’t handle it that people bullied people who could not stand up for themselves.”
They met in Cape Town through a friend of her first husband. ‘He just looked at me and Paul and decided we belonged together. He pestered Paul to meet me more formally before I went back to Johannesburg. We met and three months later we were married.”
They worked together on what has now became known as the ‘ID Project”. ‘We started the project because people couldn’t get their IDs processed here in Brandfort. I eventually got the department of internal affairs to certify me as a commissioner of oaths and Paul took all the photographs. He declared it a project and he documented all these people, about 3 000, and we got amazing photographs.
The Alberts travelled all over the Free State to little towns, prisons ‘We were in demand. We were booked. It was an amazing project and we worked our butts off. The whole project was my project. He didn’t want to do ID photographs but I bullied him into it.”
Charmaine says that at their home in the old Walmay Hotel ‘everything is in abundance”. ‘There is a huge collection of books, CDs and records. I can never pack him up. It’s so huge. I will just die in Brandfort one day.”