Abandoned No.36: A Forgotten Car, a Karoo Journey, and the Beauty of Chance
The photograph I was never looking for — and why that made all the difference.
STORY BEHIND THE ARTWORKPHOTOGRAPHY
Martin Osner
5/29/20265 min read
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.
The Story behind Abandoned No.36
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.
The Road to the Karoo
In September 2015, my family and I were travelling through one of my favourite parts of South Africa. My wife, our three children, and I had spent time around Prince Albert before making our way deep into the Swartberg Mountains to visit De Hel — known more formally as Gamkaskloof — a remote valley that had sheltered a small farming community in near-total isolation for over a century. Before the 1960s, there was no road in or out. People moved on foot, by donkey, by horseback.
It is one of those places that one never forgets. I documented part of that descent into the valley in a short film — and if you have never seen it, I would invite you to watch it below. De Hel presented me with a particular photographic challenge: the valley is so deep that sunlight only reaches the floor late in the morning and disappears again early in the afternoon. That constraint pushed me to discover a technique I had not worked with before — multiple in-camera exposures — and the film became as much about that creative process as it did about the place itself.
▶ Watch the film: A Descending Journey to De Hel — YouTube
A Tip from a Former Student
Part of the reason I wanted to spend time in Prince Albert was to catch up with Louis Botha, a former student of mine 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 when I arrived and found that he had already built a beautiful gallery space in Prince Albert and was deeply entrenched in his photography, fully committed, 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.
During our time together, Louis generously shared his knowledge of the surrounding area, pointing me toward some remarkable spaces to photograph in and around the mountains, including his own insights about De Hel. And 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 in this way, unplanned, unforced, and 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 that seriously. There was always a sense that my steps through this collection were being ordered for me, not by me.
So we headed off to Klaarstroom.
The Photograph I Was Not Looking For
When we arrived in Klaarstroom, I was not immediately convinced. At first glance, everything seemed quite ordinary. I remember wondering whether there was anything there for me at all.
Then, almost by chance, I noticed a handful of old vintage cars rusting quietly on a hill.
They were on private property, so I went to look for the owner to ask permission, but the house was locked, and nobody was home. Still, on my way back down, one particular composition caught my eye and simply would not let go.
Normally, I am not an advocate for telephone poles and power lines in a photograph. More often than not, they become a distraction. But here, they added something important. They gave the image a strange sense of narrative, almost as though the car was still connected to a road, a conversation, or a world that had long since moved on.
I worked very close to the car with a wide-angle lens, using deliberate distortion to exaggerate the front of the vehicle and give it presence. I have always felt that distortion is one of the most underused qualities in photography; rather than something to avoid, it can become part of the visual language itself. I stitched the exposures together to create the feeling of a panoramic capture, while bringing the final image back into the regular horizontal format of the Abandoned Collection.
It was not just an old vehicle in a landscape. It felt like a remnant of a story — something left behind, but not forgotten.
A Project of Patience
As is my practice, I did not process the files straight away. I left them. Several months passed before I returned to these images, and when I did, this one appealed to me immediately.
There was something about the car, the open land, the telephone poles, the sky, and the stillness of the scene that 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 fourteen years, it grew. I made a conscious decision from the beginning 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, it would have lost its soul.
The DNA of the Abandoned Collection lies in its randomness. These photographs were meant to be stumbled upon within the natural rhythm of my fine art work, found while travelling to photograph landscapes, quiet towns, open spaces and rural scenes. Many potential 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.
The Coffee Table Book
Some time ago, I began preparing a coffee table book of the complete Abandoned Collection. The project was paused before it reached publication, but I have been thinking about it again, and the timing now feels right.
These forty photographs deserve to exist in a beautifully produced book, not simply as a record of old cars, forgotten buildings and weathered places, but as a celebration of a body of work that unfolded slowly, honestly and unexpectedly over many years. Each image carries a story behind it, a journey, a moment of chance, a decision to wait for the right light or to walk away and come back another day. Together, they represent something that cannot be rushed, and a book feels like the most fitting way to honour that.
My intention is to bring this project back to life and release the Abandoned Collection in a way that does justice to the journey of photographing it.
If you would like to be among the first to hear when the book becomes available, I would love for you to stay close. Keep an eye on the newsletter, or simply reach out directly.
Best Seen in Person
Abandoned No.36 is currently on exhibition at our gallery in Hout Bay. Like most work in the Abandoned Collection, it carries a scale, a detail and an atmosphere that a screen simply cannot fully convey. Standing in front of it is a different experience altogether.
You are invited to come and see it.
If you are not able to visit in person, the work can also be viewed online.
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