South Africa's Most Beloved Photographer Obie Oberholzer

“Few SA artists can productively be called raconteurs, as in a skilful teller of anecdotes. Most are simply too glum – solemn, too – when spinning yarns around their work. If only more artists, in particular photographers, could be like Obie Oberholzer.”
Sean O’Toole, Financial Mail
© Obie Oberholzer Diesel And Dust
“I love to travel and look – to look at people and places and things. To journey somewhere, to watch big things get smaller, mingle, change hue and disappear. To look so far that it hurts . . . and smell Africa.  There’s freedom in not knowing quite where you’re going – I mean, what’s another 100 kilometers if you’re making your way towards Swartwitpensbokfonteinberg?”

© Obie Oberholzer Diesel And Dust
Diesel And Dust 
Visually stimulating images of Africa offer a multifaceted view of the continent in this recollection that is at once a history, a meditation, a travel memoir, and a tribute.“Diesel and Dust is a philosophy. The smell of diesel and dust early in the morning give me a feeling that I’m far away, and this book is about that – interesting people and places; about wonderings and passing’s through.
Round The Bend  
Obie Oberholzer is acknowledged as one of South Africa’s best-loved photographers. A modern troubadour with a camera, his latest book titled Round the Bend: Travels Around Southern Africa tells his stories of journeys through Southern Africa in the last two years. This is Obie Oberholzer’s seventh book and it has been hailed as his magnum opus.
Round the Bend is a splendidly produced travelogue of 190 colour photos in 176 pages, mostly accompanied by zany stories of a number of journeys through South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, Swaziland and Mozambique.
© Obie Oberholzer Round The Bend
© Obie Oberholzer Round The Bend
© Obie Oberholzer Round The Bend
© Obie Oberholzer Round The Bend
Beyond Bagamo 
Obie Oberholzer began this, his fourth major photographic odyssey, in Cape Town, on the 1st of April 1994. He meandered his way north, across plateaus and plains, through valleys and over mountains up along Africa’s eastern side. There were jungles to come and vast deserts and roads that were no longer roads. He travelled the byways through South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritria and Sudan to Egypt (via Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel). In the parking lot near the Great Pyramids of Giza, he wiped the dust from his dashboard. The distance read 40,000 kilometres and the time said 9 months and twenty days. This is his story.
© Obie Oberholzer Beyond Bagamo
© Obie Oberholzer Beyond Bagamo
© Obie Oberholzer Beyond Bagamo
© Obie Oberholzer Dam Wall with Cactus - Zimbabwe
© Obie Oberholzer Desert Road Near Terrace Bay Skeleton Coast Namibia
© Obie Oberholzer Roermond
© Obie Oberholzer Siwaoasis
© Self portrait Obie Oberholzer