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KLAUS OPPENHEIMER PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION (Myfanwy Bekker Studio in Plettenberg Bay until December 22).

“PHOTOGRAPHY is truth” said Jean-Luc Godard, the French film director, and this exhibition of photographs by Klaus Oppenheimer is certainly no less than the truth.

Oppenheimer combined a successful career in business with a passion for photography for many years, but since relocating to Plettenberg Bay in 2001, he has been able to devote more of his time to the art of the lens and this exhibition is just one of the fruits of his work in recent years.

The exhibition features 29 photographs in large format, typically 400mm by 350mm, mounted and framed in glass. The images have all been printed with ultra chrome inks on a variety of papers and the whole is presented with meticulous precision.

There are images aplenty from the fascia of The Guggenheim Bilbao to psychedelic figure studies of the female form, from a door in lonely relief to a selection of kimonos for sale at a market in the East. The most powerful imagery of the exhibition however has to be a series of photographs depicting the haunting beauty of Namibia. Thirteen photographs show images as diverse as the convoluted trunk of a tree in Swakopmund, to the towering sand dunes of Sossusvlei.

A photograph taken at Ai-Ais in the Fish River Canyon of granite boulders has a tactile quality about it and brings home the solidity of huge boulders of igneous rock.

All of Oppenheimer’s photographs are rich in texture and many are very minimalist. The photographs of fronds of grass are a lesson in economy of line and form.

Oppenheimer states that “the interplay of light, shade and subject holds endless interest” for him, and all of the work at this exhibition is an exemplar of this maxim. – Reviewed by Timothy Twidle GARDEN ROUTE CORRESPONDENT