My Photographic Inspiration #1

Josef Koudelka

Copyright - Magnum Photos

Of the thousands of photos I have taken over the last six months, nothing comes close to the emotion the Great Photographers were able to capture, from the simplest of Abstracts, to their incredible talent of making the photo tell a story. Josef Koudelka is one of my photographic heroes.

I continue to study and learn from the best, and only occasionally do I get it right.

Here's a few of my Koudelka favourites:

To Snow White and..

..the Seven million other people who posted pics of the Snow over Gauteng yesterday. I decided to wait a day and let the bandwagon pass before posting. Fashionably late, as they say.

It is the first time I've seen Snow in Johannesburg. Last Time, back in 1981, I was at Bekker school in Magaliesburg and missed it.

The Triangle of Death

My first attempt at You Tubing. Simple and straight forward. Let's hope I improve with time.

Monster Rising

My new position has kept me so bloody busy I clean forgot to celebrate my blog's 2nd birthday with a meaningful entry....and now i have absolutely nothing to say.

Ah well, the blog's gone from anger to frustration, and then progressed to some level of decency and again decended down to a level of total crap. But I'm not too bothered with that, because at the very least my blog cannot be blamed for falling into a rut. There's been articles on everything from politics to religion and self gratification to self pity. All aspects of life as we know it has been covered, and here and there an attempt has been made to lift certain individuals out of the gutter(self included).

I hope that those few followers whom have stuck with me have at the very least enjoyed a few articles,and I also hope I can lift the game a little over the next two years, so that there's some entertainment value.

Ciao, Chihuahua

PS: The above graphic was created using Jim Beam and Photoshop.

Osama B

No matter how much time you spend with a person, you never really get to know them, and although you think you do, you’ll never understand them.

There comes a time in any relationship, be it one of love or friendship, when a certain event shakes the very foundation of what you thought you knew about your friend or lover. This event, often has enough life changing atoms to either make or break the relationship. You find out a friend has been stealing from you, or your life partner has been burning the lover’s candle from both ends.

I was unfortunate to find myself in one of those situations a week ago. I remember the day clearly, because somehow on payday the fogginess that normally lurks at the fringes of my conscious mind lifts and I’m more alert than usual.
B was unusually quiet in the car from work and I knew something was amiss. About halfway home she must have realised that the subject which had her in such turmoil, had to be breached, and she let it out.

As she spoke and the signs of relief slowly smoothed over her beautiful face, so I absorbed, and what had pained her, slowly became visible on my face. The lines on my forehead had deepened, and the sadness that had cloaked her face previously, now ran its cold fingers across mine.

B had come into the crosshairs of the United States of America’s Secret Service. She was thought of in the same vein as Osama Bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, almost anyone associated with Syria, and of course Mulla Omar.
She was considered a terrorist. All the worlds’ worst nightmares about car bombs, suicide bombers, snipers and hi-jacking, right here beside me, contained in the petite frame that was B.

Standard Bank had frozen all her accounts and debit orders, pending investigation. “Our hands are tied”, they tell her. I ask her if she didn’t watch the news, say, about two or three years ago? Our great esteemed leader, George W. Bush had issued executive orders that everyone in the free world had to reconfirm their personal details with their banks, including home address, identity documents and so forth.

“No”, she said. “You know I don’t watch the news.
As her boyfriend for three years, I understand where she’s coming from. B is too carefree and busy with life to bother about the woes of the world. She never watches the news and only buys a newspaper when I ask her to grab me the Sunday paper from the café around the corner. Even then she might only glance at the TV schedule for a few minutes. I envy her for that. I however, tend to get a bit annoyed when someone tells me something of importance in world politics that I’m not aware of, first.

So the two thousand and loose change B had in the bank made the red light go off in the White House, and now she can’t even pay the water bill. And as she mentions that to me, I also start relaxing. Because I know, it is times like these where couples have to stand together and fight off the forces of evil as one unit.

“They won’t get us my love, we’ll fight them till the bitter end”, I say to her, as we drive over the pollution-darkened hills of Johannesburg, and into the Sunset

Just a Puppy

This for Catherine.

Myself (far left) and My sister (second from right) with our cousins, taking a cookie break from playing.

I was very shy as a kid. This is a rare photo of me with a group. Most of our family archives have me on my own in the photos. I could never blame other kids when I was naughty and heading for a hiding, because I almost always played by myself.

La gente olvidada

I come upon many ruins and abandoned farm houses on my trips through the country and apart from the photos I take for archiving, I also try to solve the human puzzle. I wonder who lived there, and where they went.

Sometimes the structure of the buildings and their placement tell a story about the man of the house. Even ruins can tell a story. Sometimes the stone used in building were meticulously carved and shaped, carefully placed and the mortar or clay chosen for endurance. Most often stones of a particular shape were chosen without the need to cut or shape and the binding method merely mud mixed with gravel or grass.

The first rule of Private Investigators is most propably still; check the trash. This is no different if you want to find out more about the lives of the people who once lived in these farm houses and dwellings, on what was once open grasslands.

I walk in an ever widening circle around the 'house' and eventually I'll come upon a hole or semi-hole, often hidden by trees or bushes. There were no Pikitup's back in the day, and almost all farms had a hole or walled area where the trash was dumped or burned. The leftover food went straight to the pigs,cows or whatever farm animals were raised.

You'll have some difficulty finding these 'dumpyards' at buildings or ruins more than a hundred years old, but most of the ruins in our area are only 50 to 80 years old. Nevertheless, all kinds of different items can be found from old softdrink bottles to 'ancient' perfume canisters and even tools and kitchenware. I've found everything from a rusty sickle blade(minus handle) to a penknife, from which the wooden outer had rotted away.

I imagine how the farmers made a living, often finding worked soil not too far from the outbuildings, indicating crop fields and such. Almost always there are fruit trees clumped around the house/ruin itself and generally the household seemed well sustained. A kraal nearby might have held cows or sheep and smaller holdings, chickens or other fowl.

The scene paints a picture of a homestead well maintained and buildings placed in an orderly and well planned manner. At one such place I even found a water canal, built from a nearby levee at a water run off area, all the way to the farmhouse.

It is not too difficult to understand why many of these places now stand in ruin. Perhaps it was the discovery of Gold on the Rand which tempted many a farmer in search of fortune. Or maybe their offspring were not as keen to toil in the fields and manage the hardships, instead opting for the promise of wealth in the fast growing financial capital of Johannesburg.

Years before, War was of course the other factor which played a great part in the laying to waste of farm and crop. During the second war of independance, under the command of Kitchener, Milner and Roberts, more than homesteads and farms belonging to Boer people were plundered and burned down. Animals belonging to the Boers were killed in the cruelest ways possible while the women, whose men were on the battlefield, had to watch helplessly.

The motive behind this action was the destruction of the farms in order to prevent the fighting burgers from obtaining food, and to demoralise the Boers by leaving their women and children homeless on the open veld.

It certainly did the trick and apart from the hardy few who continued the guerilla conflict for another two years, few farmers returned to their land to rebuild their farms.

After an outing like this I'm left feeling drained emotionally, but at the same time with an undeniable feeling of pride in the Afrikaner of yore, and then again a certain sadness at what we'd become. Just another displaced people.

It makes it easier to understand how the indigenous tribes must have felt from the first day the Europeans landed on their soil, and how they had to endure oppression for more than 350 years before attaining their freedom.

Will we again be displaced? Will some fellow also walk my fields in the future, and wonder what became of us, sifting through my trash finding the old cellphone i threw out the other day.

The Small Town Road Trips

Myself and B intend to do at least one road trip a Month to visit small and interesting towns in Gauteng and perhaps a little further. Have a look at the link to your right (Weekend Road Trips)if you would like to see the latest photos.