Bob Cnoops Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1947 -

Roland Barthes: “Photographic shock lies in revealing what was hidden”

Having been born in a mission hospital in what was then deep rural South Africa, and then living closely with the local tribes until my mid-teens, I was exposed to a multitude of traditional values, beliefs, stories and tribal practices. This was an important formative aspect of my life and has continued to be of importance even after living in an urban environment for the last four decades or so. Intrinsic in my work are the influences of Africa, surreal influences, I had taken in as a young boy and later as a grown man; a surreal African reality I am totally comfortable with. My images thus reflect back on the hidden “surrealities” of the Self, my hidden African Self.

A part of my work concerns the portrayal of emotional “darkness” in its execution. I am drawn to darkness probably as a result of the tribal beliefs I have observed. As I am comfortable with the enigma of Africa, I then must, as a direct result, also be just as comfortable with the enigma of darkness.

While photographically investigating a particular subject, I work towards a deliberate, planned goal in a focused way, allowing intuitive responses to influence it. This inevitably means that the photographs show different layers of meaning. Often it then becomes a question of “OF and ABOUT”: Whatever the photograph is OF, is not necessarily what the photograph is ABOUT. Symbol and metaphor play important roles here.

Very often I shoot those things that catch my eye in passing. This opportunistic approach results in new avenues of subject investigation which have led to many revelations and insights, causing surprising results. Frequently I am forced to ask myself: “Where did that come from?”, “How did that get into my head?”, “Whose whisper is that?”. Of importance here is the visual impact on me of the Surrealist and Bauhaus movements and of the works of Eduard Steichen, Irving Penn, Joel-Peter Witkin and many others.

On a technical level, my personal work is all done on film. Analogue photography forces me to adopt a contemplative approach which suits my temperament very well. Also, I do all of my own film processing and printing using the so-called Alternative Photographic Processes, i.e. antique and experimental processes. These processes work well with my imagery as they add to the sense of enigmatic surrealism I want to depict. My prints are primarily done in the Van Dyke Brown, Cyanotype, and Gum-Oil Processes on textured water-colour paper. The texture adds another dimension to the reading of the photograph. My hand-made light-sensitive emulsions are hand-coated onto the paper. All of these processes have a high archival permanence value. The editions for the images are no more than 10.