On mountains and moments

On a trip in the southern Drakensberg, a torrential downpour and a field of prickly thistles got acclaimed photographer Obie Oberholzer thinking about the power of perspective

- Obie Oberholzer

The way beyond Barkly East, leading onward to Moshoeshoe’s Drift and the village of Rhodes, was some what problematic to negotiate – or, plainly said, just shitty. If it weren’t for the high mountains I could have been on some track in Equatorial Guinea or driving through the green paddocks of New Zealand after Cyclone Gabrielle had passed. Owing to the recent rains, the little gravel road with its multiple muddy vehicle tracks looked a lot worse than the road almost never travelled. In fact, my fancy Autobahn-designed German car, now with its tyre treads filled with mountain mud, kept on flickering and beeping all kinds of commands like “Change to snow conditions on all alpine inclines!” I know, I know – I should have read the manual, but it’s nearly as thick as the Bible. So there we were, skidding and slipping all over a mud slide in the southern Drakensberg, not having thoroughly studied the Bible or the VWTiguan’s manual.

I still follow that dream of going somewhere I’ve been many a time before, in the hope of finding new alignments of lines and shapes, draped with other moods and light. This somewhat photographer, in his quest for special moments, would guide his search for images through a moving theatre, a collage of continually moving scenes. When you are visually lured by the weird and wonderful, the vast and the near, the up and the down, it all comes down to two things: timing and perspective.