Abandoned Car Photography, No.36 in the Karoo

The photograph that found me

A short road trip to Klaarstroom while visiting Prince Albert led to an unexpected discovery: a forgotten car on a hill, standing silently beneath the Karoo sky.

Sometimes the most important photographs are not the ones you go looking for. They are the ones that find you. That is exactly how Abandoned No.36 came into being, and it is a story I have been wanting to tell properly for a long time.

Louis Botha, and a drive to Klaarstroom

Part of the reason I wanted to spend time in Prince Albert was to catch up with Louis Botha, a former student who had once walked into one of my evening photography classes looking for a way into the creative side of himself. I remember him well. He came with curiosity and a genuine desire to express something, and that kind of student stays with you.

So it was a wonderful moment to arrive and find that he had built a beautiful gallery in Prince Albert and was deeply committed to his photography, producing meaningful work and living the life he had set out to find. As a teacher, there are few things more satisfying than seeing that.

Louis generously shared his knowledge of the area, pointing me towards some remarkable places to photograph in and around the mountains, including his own insights about De Hel. Then, knowing I was quietly working on my Abandoned collection, he suggested I take a drive out to Klaarstroom. He had a feeling there might be something there for me.

The Abandoned collection had always grown this way: unplanned, unforced, sporadic by design. I never went looking for it in any calculated sense. But when someone whose instincts I trusted pointed me in a direction, I took it seriously. There was always a sense that my steps through this collection were being ordered for me, not by me.

The thirty sixth of forty

As is my practice, I did not process the files straight away. I left them. Several months passed before I came back to these images, and when I did, this one appealed to me immediately. The car, the open land, the telephone poles, the sky and the stillness of the scene held together beautifully. It became the thirty sixth photograph in the Abandoned collection.

That collection had begun many years earlier with a single image of an old car on a pole, a photograph I took without any plan for a series. Slowly, over thirteen years, it grew. I decided from the start not to hunt for abandoned subjects in any calculated or systematic way. I would not research exact locations, plan every outing, or chase images under controlled conditions. Had I done that, the collection would have come together too quickly and, in my view, lost its soul.

The DNA of the Abandoned collection lies in its randomness. These photographs were meant to be stumbled upon in the natural rhythm of my fine art work, found while travelling to photograph landscapes, quiet towns, open spaces and rural scenes. Many possible subjects were left behind because the light was wrong, the season was off, or the atmosphere simply was not there. That waiting became part of the process.

I stopped at Abandoned No.40. Forty felt right. It gave the collection a sense of natural completion, not because there were no more abandoned subjects in the world, but because the journey itself had said enough.

See the whole Abandoned collection