For his 16th coffee table book, legendary photographer Obie Oberholzer hit upon the novel idea of photographing nine small South African towns and their namesakes in the Netherlands, revealing stark visual and historical contrasts.
Oberholzer, 77, who lives with his wife Lynn, 75, in the coastal village of Nature’s Valley on the Garden Route, took pictures of towns like Utrecht, Haarlem and Rotterdam and then spent a month in Holland doing the same.
Speaking to Weekender about his newly released book, Oberholzer, a former professor of photography at Rhodes University’s Department of Fine Art, said churches and a few buildings were the original structures left in rundown South African dorpies.
“Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape, for example, lies under some hills in contrast to the very flat one in the Netherlands.
“It is an attractive town with a sandstone church with a beautiful garden and a bullet hole above the door from a skirmish between the Boers and the English and there are a couple of colonial buildings still standing.
“There is a huge farming community and you see cattle and tractors.
“Dordrecht in the Netherlands is very old with some very compact houses and lots of water.”
Alongside his captivating photographs, Oberholzer has added captions explaining how settlers ended up there.
“There is nothing like a good caption and I learnt to write them when I worked for magazines. And so parallel to the pictures, I write parallel stories.”
The extended captions provide potted histories and fascinating facts, adding depth to his distinctive images.
“They [the Dutch] arrived in the Cape and got gatvol with the British and did the Great Trek.
“The settlers had a longing for home and called towns after the cities they came from.
“Then they built a church. They were conservative Calvinists and so without a church they had nothing.”
Over the years, Oberholzer had come across three of the dorpies with Dutch names while working for publications like Getaway and Country Life.
“I would choose a town and do a story. After I did Dordrecht, Haarlem and Utrecht, a friend suggested I see how many South African towns have their mother city in the Netherlands.
“And so I approached a friend who is a Dutch publisher and who likes me, heaven knows why …
“The Dutch are very academic and find it fascinating what their people did in Africa. Half the books are in the Netherlands.”
With the help of a sponsor, Oberholzer and his wife spent a month staying in Dutch B&Bs.
Armed with his Canon and his unerring artistic eye, the larger-than-life lensman captured the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the nine Dutch cities and the people who live in them.
“We always stayed in the old areas of the cities and I could walk everywhere.
“You have to park outside the cities in parking garages and then drag your suitcases to the B&Bs, and the parking garages are almost as expensive as the B&Bs!
“I didn’t walk and take photographs with my wife. She talks too much and I need to concentrate,” he jokes.
She may not walk with him on photographic forays, but she has accompanied him on most of his trips including to Cuba and Yemen as well as in the days of tearing around SA in a double cab Isuzu and a tent.
In their golden years, the Oberholzers cruise around in a sedate VW sedan and overnight at comfy B&B bookings.
The Oberholzers have been married for 54 years, having met at Stellenbosch University — Oberholzer was a resident of the now-infamous Wilgenhof Residence and calls himself the last of the living legends.
“Lynn keeps me going. I would not be talking to you if it were not for her. She gives me support.
“She is very fit and gives calisthenics classes. She makes me take a morning beach walk and afternoon cycle and in-between I work on my images.”
Though Oberholzer writes his own captions, his wife, a former teacher, edits them.
“I write the same way I photograph — in a haphazard, strange way.”
Since leaving Makhanda, the couple have lived in Nature’s Valley, which Oberholzer refers to as paradise.
“We are surrounded by forest and live minutes from the ocean and I live with all the scraps and old signs I’ve collected.
“When I drive past an old sign and look in the rear-view mirror it falls off and I’ve never had a screwdriver to put it back up.”
Contrary to what one might expect, Oberholzer does not lug bunches of cameras on his road trips into the hinterland.
The secret to capturing great images is having a good eye, not tinkering with equipment.
“I don’t get hooked on the technical side of photography. I have two cameras and two lenses and that’s it.
“I fiddle with my eyes — my camera is just my eyes. Do you know that of all our senses, our sight is the most underdeveloped? We look but we don’t really see.
“That is why I’m quite good — I can see how a picture will look. That takes a lot of training. Everyone can learn technique, but it’s in the theme.”
He revels in telling the tale of meeting celebrated British war photographer Don McCullin at a photographic festival and, while standing next to him at a pissoir (urinal), asking him for a “one-liner” for his students at Rhodes University.
“He said ‘tell them I use my camera like a toothbrush. It does the job’.
“It means you know the technical side of your camera so well that you don’t have to think how to use it.”
Oberholzer also talks about the fundamental difference between the art of photography and fine art.
“Fine artists start with a blank canvas and add things. We start with a large scene and subtract from it.”
With Going Dutch freshly launched and gracing bookstore shelves, what is Oberholzer’s next move?
“I don’t know if I can do a book much better than this one. But I was thinking of a retrospective though I can’t call it that because I took better photographs in my latter years.”
He is considering titles for his next book:
“One of my mottos is ‘Follow that Dream’, from a song Elvis sang in 1961. Or I could call it ‘For the Love of It’.
“I am a fanatical photographer. It’s the one thing I do all the time.”
• Going Dutch is available at Exclusive Books.
Weekender
