By Staff reporter
A RETROSPECTIVE exhibition of photographs by the award-winning Namibian photographer, Amy Schoeman FPPSA (Dux) is presently on display in the Sasol Gallery in Stellenbosch in South Africa.
The exhibition star-ted on Wednesday and runs until May 31.
Regarded as one of Namibia’s top photographers, Amy Schoeman was born in England and educated in Namibia and South Africa, obtaining a BComm (Law) degree at the University of Stellenbosch.
She started her professional career in photography in 1977 as journalist/photographer for the then Department of Nature Conservation and Tourism in the South West African Administration. She specialised in environmental photography, focussing on the graphic, textural and abstract qualities of the desert landscape. Amy holds two PPSA (Professional Photographers of Southern Africa) Fellowships, one in Environmental and the other in Fine Art photography.
The exhibition is an overview of work done over the past 25 years and is presented as 12 portfolios. The first of these, the Environmental Collection, features the highlights of images taken in the Skeleton Coast, Kaokoland and Damaraland in the remote north-western region of Namibia. This work was taken a step further in the Zen Portfolio, a series of desert abstracts based on the optical illusions created by reversing or turning images upside down.
Ten years later this work evolved into Mystic Desert 1&2, the last of the 12 portfolios. Presence of the Past is a series of split-tone prints depicting coastal artefacts including shipwrecks and the weathered remains of man’s prospecting, mining and other endeavours in the Namib Desert; and Desert Textures is a series of lith-toned prints portraying the graphic and ephemeral qualities of the Namib Desert.
A departure from the desert work is Womandala, a series of solarised black and white prints depicting issues pertaining to women and The Nine Muses, inspired by classic Greek mythology; Hiroshima Namibia, developed in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima.