Photo Alchemy
Photo AlchemyThe workbench
Collage and montageCut and rebuilt
African Art FusionWith Simon Shone
Majestic Panoramas
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Twenty eight collections, and more being added
Photo AlchemyThe workbenchCollage and montageCut and rebuiltAfrican Art FusionWith Simon Shone
Black and white photography by Martin Osner, photographed for black and white from the start and never converted afterwards. Nature first, then the city.
"Black and white is classic, and it is nostalgic, because it has been handed down to us through the history of photography. But the real thing about black and white is that it strips the colour layer away and reveals the essence of the piece. There is nothing left to compete with."
"It is not as easy to photograph as people think. When you get it right, though, it drives immediate impact."
"If I were ever given the choice of presenting a portfolio in colour or in black and white, I would lean towards the black and white. It is completely and utterly editable, absolutely powerful, and it shows reality in a different light altogether."
Prints are sold through Osner Gallery, shipped worldwide.
See the black and white printsNature first, then the city. Tap any picture to see it larger.
"What I see with a lot of my own students is that they photograph in colour and they think in colour, and black and white becomes an afterthought. If it is not working in colour, let me just try black and white. For me that is the wrong way round."
"It is going in with a complete and utter mindset that is black and white. The whole Ansel Adams zone system, the different tonal values, how you work in shades of grey, how the scene is going to interpret in shades of grey, and how you are going to process it so that you can bring certain colours out into the grey shades."
"Digital processing today makes that so much easier than the old film system. But you still need to go into that particular shoot with that particular mindset."
Two things he actually does. "I often use a deep red filter, not to shoot through but to look through. Hold it up to your eye and it takes away or mutes the colour, so only the shades come through. Even in a red tone, you get a very good idea of what the scene is going to look like before you shoot it. It helps a lot."
"I also set the camera to black and white mode, so that when you take your first test you can see how close you are to a good black and white, or how much digital work is going to be needed to get that black and white piece back out."
"Maybe it is just because I come from the darkroom in my earlier days, but in my world nothing beats the black and white darkroom, hands down."
"The control you have over the processing of the negative beforehand, the printing, the burning and dodging, the toning, the smell of the hypo fixer, all of that is so nostalgic and so creative. If I want to get creative, all I need to do is walk into the black and white darkroom, switch on the red safelight, and we are in our creative zone."
That is also where the eye came from. Reading a scene as shapes and tonal values rather than colours is a darkroom habit, and African Mood is where it shows most plainly. No.1 was photographed in 2007 near a rural village close to the Zimbabwean border: one small figure on a sand road, and the baobabs still lose the argument.
"I have found that the human form is an incredibly strong shape in visual art. It does not matter how big or how small it is. If it is in the composition, it is going to attract the viewer's attention."
The film, 4 minutes
The power of human shape in a composition
Behind African Mood. Why a figure, however small, becomes the resting point of a picture and gives it scale, and why the best of the series was made close to home. "Very often an acre of diamonds can be found in your own back garden. It has much more to do with what one sees than where one travels."
Watch on YouTube
African Mood No.2 to No.11
A lone figure walking away into thick mist on an empty road, the centre line the only hard edge left in the frame.
The Drakensberg. Two men walking home across the veld after church, under a telephone line, with a flat topped hill behind them.
Makeshift rugby poles on open ground near a farm called Boplaas, at Cross Rivers in the Western Cape, on a misty winter morning. “Rugby is like a religion in South Africa, and makeshift poles on an open piece of land are a common sight in the rural areas.”
A young boy sprinting along the promenade near Macassar in Cape Town, and the most cheerful picture in the series.
A misty morning on a country dirt road, horses in the field beside the fence line, and a single telephone pole holding the picture together.
Mist just outside Swellendam. A railway line runs away past a row of houses, and a man crossing it far in the distance is on his way home.
A figure on a dirt road, dwarfed by an avenue of tall bare trees. One of the most asked for pictures in the series, and the clearest proof of what a small human shape does to a composition.
The Drakensberg. Children playing outside the local spaza shop, with the mountains behind.
A misty morning near Swellendam. A truck comes out of the fog with its headlights on while a man walks the other way beneath the gum trees.
The Drakensberg. Horses grazing in front of rural dwellings in the long grass.
A complete series photographed in tribute to the photographer Martin calls his mentor, Ansel Adams, and the place where the zone system thinking on this page shows most plainly.
Castle Rock is the one people know: a long exposure on the Cape Town coast where the water goes to mist and the rock holds the only hard edge in the frame. Every print in the series is square, signed, an open edition of the Portfolio Collection, and they run up to 110 x 110 cm.
The rest of the series moves between the sea and the mountain: Jacob's Bay on the West Coast, Misty Cliffs, Moonlight Bay, the waterfall at the top of Orange Kloof on Table Mountain, Cecilia Forest, and a single tree on a hill.
Jacob's Bay, Misty Cliffs, Moonlight Bay, Orange Kloof, Cecilia View and Secluded Hill
Waves breaking over the rocks at Jacob's Bay, up the West Coast from Cape Town. The most straightforwardly graphic frame in the series: white water, black rock, nothing else asked to carry it.
Photographed at Misty Cliffs on the Cape Peninsula, where the haze does the work that a colour picture would have to invent. It is the frame that shows why muting the colour first, with a red filter held to the eye, tells you whether a scene will print.
The moodiest of the seascapes, and the one that leans hardest on the darker end of the tonal range. Cape Town, at night.
A waterfall at the top of Orange Kloof on Table Mountain, in a part of the mountain most people never walk. Falling water is the classic zone system problem: hold the white and you lose the rock, hold the rock and the water blows out.
Taken in Cecilia Forest on Table Mountain, looking out. Trees in the near ground, the mountain behind, and the whole picture built on how far apart those two greys sit.
A single tree on a hill, and almost nothing else. The simplest photograph in the series and the hardest kind to make: take one more thing out and there is no picture left.
Photographed in 2007 in a rural village called Geluk, which is the Afrikaans word for luck, or happiness. Two children lean through a broken window and neither of them is performing for the camera.
"I delight in how children live in the moment, whatever their circumstances, and I consider that to be a gift." That is the whole series in one line, and it is why it works in black and white: with the colour gone, what is left is the faces and the light, not the state of the building.
Archival prints on fine art paper, editions of twenty regardless of size. It is also the photograph at the top of this page.
Children of Geluk No.2 and No.3, Endurance No.2 and Christmas Spirit
Three young boys posing for the picture, and enjoying it. The pose is the point: they arranged themselves.
A group of boys and their sister in the village of Geluk, all of them in on it at once.
A young girl being encouraged by her mother to look into the camera. The portrait is about the encouragement as much as the child.
Christmas Eve, 2007. The adults are shopped out and the children are still expectant, and to finish the story a model in an American Swiss poster laughs, having taken the grownups' money.
Natures Pattern was photographed on infrared film in the Drakensberg, which is another way of taking the colour out before the picture is made rather than afterwards. Infrared reads foliage as near white, so the pattern and the texture are all that is left to look at.
Banks of Nevis is the quieter one, a stream working its way through an evergreen forest in Scotland, and Austere Pattern No.1 is the canopy photographed straight up from underneath, so the branches read as pure line.
Ebony & Ivory is a joint portfolio, black and white nature photography by father and daughter. Martin's four are here. The rest of the series is Samantha Lee Osner's, and it lives in the gallery.
Banks of Nevis and Austere Pattern No.1
A stream meandering through an evergreen forest in Scotland, and the gentlest picture on the page. Signed open edition, up to 140 x 107 cm.
A canopy of Drakensberg trees photographed straight up from below, so the branches become line and pattern rather than trees. Calm, considered, and the one people hang in a stairwell.
On the Move was made in 2007, during a week in Cape Town while Martin was exhibiting at the Everard Read Gallery. Wandering between exhibition preparations, he found himself watching the choreography of people in the street, and an unplanned week became one of his most enduring collections.
Camps Bay Rhythm is the one that holds it together. A street guitarist plays for tips a few metres from a pedestrian crossing, and the music, the movement, the architecture and the light all land in one frame.
City Life came earlier, shot in Johannesburg in 2004, where people collide with walls layered in graffiti, texture and history. Those are the pictures where a painted figure on a wall and a real person passing it end up in conversation without either of them knowing.
No Stopping, No Entry, Seaside Shower, Chasing Gulls, Friends, Look Up, Yesterday's News and Rock & Roll China
Cape Town, 2007, and one of the first pictures in the collection. A man walks purposefully past a One Way, No Stopping sign, which is as neat a picture of independence as the street is likely to hand you. Martin saw it from his hotel window while preparing for the Everard Read exhibition.
Seen from above: an older man walking beside a bold No Entry sign while other figures blur past him. The stillness of the main subject against the motion of everyone else, and the tension between restriction and freedom that runs through the whole collection.
An outdoor shower on a still Cape Town afternoon, photographed from above, with one seagull cutting across the sky at the right moment. Martin waited for something to complete the composition. Nobody ever walked into the frame, and then the bird went through it.
The harbour promenade at Hout Bay. A young girl runs after a scattering of seagulls and the haze softens everything behind her, so the picture is about motion and delight rather than the place.
The jetty at Gordon's Bay harbour, and a group of boys walking back barefoot along the wall from a day of fishing, one of them carrying a hand line with the catch still swinging from it.
Johannesburg, 2004. A schoolgirl walks past a graffiti schoolboy whose raised hand seems to be telling her to look up, keep her chin up and study hard. She has the step of somebody accepting the advice.
Brixton, Johannesburg. A man stands absorbed in a newspaper he has taken from a bin while a painted figure beside him reaches out as though to grab it and catch up on the headlines himself.
Johannesburg. A sketched figure on a graffiti wall throws a rock and roll salute at the world going past, and a pedestrian strides by without ever knowing he is in the joke.
Sold through Osner Art Gallery online, shipped worldwide, and shown in person at Osner Gallery in Hout Bay.
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