Karoo - Long time passing (Hardcover)

Why photograph the Karoo? In the words of Obie Oberholzer: "I stop my bakkie in front of the bottle store, then the grocery store and the butchery. Each time that I climb out, some oke asks me for money to buy ''n halwe broodjie'. This is in Afrikaans, the language spoken here. It means half a loaf of bread. I drive back to the bottle store and give some money to the honest oke. (In my books, 'dudes' live in the cities and 'okes' live in the country. In any case, in the cities they don't ask for money, they just take it). The honest oke walks into the bottle store and comes out with something in a brown packet. Liquid bread. 'What do you mean? Where are we?' We are in Petrusville, which lies in one of the greatest areas on this earth, the Karoo. My first name is Petrus and here I am where I ought to be." In his latest book, Obie Oberholzer travels across the Karoo, showing it as it has never been seen before - colourful, mysterious and vibrant, and always surprising. From the foreword by John Simpson of the BBC: "There are not many countries as beautiful as South Africa: its beauty has nothing to do with prettiness, Europe-style. It can be harsh and threatening. But everywhere you go the land is achingly lovely; not just Cape Town but everywhere from the coast of Zululand to the ferocity and grandeur of the Karoo. "Modern South Africa has its master-painter, its poet laureate, in the work of Petrus Cornelius Jacobus Oberholzer, known as Obie. Of farming stock himself - he was born outside Pretoria in the old Transvaal - he studied at Stellenbosch University and then in Munich, and eventually became a professor of photography at Rhodes University."