Happysadland // Obie Oberholzer

About the Exhibition

Venue: FotoZA Gallery
Dates: 22 Sept - October 2022
Opening Evening 21 Sept 2022 (RSVP to info@fotoza.co.za | 18:30 for 19:00)

Photographer and writer, Obie Oberholzer is difficult to find as he’s mostly somewhere else, riding road around his beloved southern lands. A free spirit, workaholic, the occasional binge boozer, a self-proclaimed visual thug, and vagabond, he’ll laugh at the claim that he is a national treasure.

Happysadland pages through his life on the road along carefree ways, devouring the diesel of the unpredictable and the dust of the haphazard. Happysadland is a collection of situations, incidents, thoughts, and self-humour. He digs deep to find essence of these southern countries, not in a politically, but in a simple human way. As the road meanders, he embraces the ridiculous, the whimsical and often the serious and the sad.

Oberholzer has never won a prize for his imagery, or even less for his writing, for him it all lies in the pleasure of sharing. He writes like he photographs, undaunted with rough edges, with sadness and gladness, but most of all, with hope.

About Obie Oberholzer

I was born on a farm in 1947 and you donʼt really want to know the rest. Except perhaps, that my photographic career started in 1956, when my mother took me to Pisa in Italy.

I placed the leaning tower vertically upright, which made all the surrounding church buildings lean over. Nobody found that funny except my mother. She made me study art at Stellenbosch University, which still makes me ponder that word.

After lengthy photographic studies at the Bayerische Staatslehr Anstalt für Fotografie and many beer halls in München, I returned to South Africa because it had wide-open spaces and the Swartberg Pass. I lectured at the Natal Technikon and Roads University for many years. I always spelt it like that so that the university would not give me any administrative duties. Back then I thought that enthusiasm was the basis of everything photographic.

Now, at 75 years old, I still think that. Every morning when I wake up I thank all the Gods for my one gift - my eyes. Through all these years I have travelled to many places, over many valleys and mountains, but somehow ---never past the checkered flag. My passion for looking at lines and shapes and colours continues unabated.

I have many songs tucked away for a hundred places, but the one that shows me where to go, is the one from Elvis Presley.

Follow that Dream.

I have been married to Lynn for 52 years and thatʼs all that you really want to know, except perhaps that I have two sons, Jesse, a Videographer on the Great Barrier Reef and Nikki, a creative director for (ADMM) Abu Dhabi Motorsport Management in the UAE. 

When they were younger I called them Money and More Money. Recently, the one that now has a lot more money asked me where my checkered flag was? With a sigh and a smile I said “Fokkolfontein”.