Guy With Camera » south africa

Kirstenbosch Summer Concerts

Andrew Brauteseth — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:14:16 +0000

Sunday afternoon with friends. Wine. Nature. Sunshine. Music. Whats not to like. Yesterday was packed.

Joburg I’m trying so hard to love you…

Andrew Brauteseth — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:57:19 +0000

Joburg I’m trying so hard to love you. Your tuscan vistas backdropped by powerlines and jacaranda branched forests bare and empty-handed during dry winters. Your signposted billboard-littered hillsides shouting skin moisturisers, Outsurance green and cell-phone deals by the starterpack. Your messages of capitalism guiding me to plastic-same malls filled with plastic-same products on plastic-same shelves in plastic air-conditioned hallways with the Nu Metro on the one side and the Megastore on the other. Filled with echoing sounds of credit cards swiping. Clicks of economy. Ants working the hive. The way you overdub your morning drive with Gareth Cliff as you fall into weekly work trances. Your love for Facebrick and construction sites. They way you leave blue PVC pipes next to the road like pieces of your history. Important but cumbersome. Your highways carrying crime statistics and end of month loan repayment worries driving you late into the night and keeping me awake in my hotel room. Your flyovers, intersections and intestines connecting a stomachache of anxious knots and traffic-jam near misses. An empty network of possibilities leading everywhere and nowhere filled with swarms of GP ZYSOMETHING number plates. A web suspended in the Highveld spun by ambitions and hijack statistics and seaside dreams and imported handbags and opinions forming a confused interlocking economy of spiritual petty crime. Your fast happy chewing gum peroxided people buzzing in cars squeezed over hot tar pushing adrenalin levels and bending fenders. Your complete disregard for changing lanes and changing history. Your AUDI and BWM dealerships, those gleaming silver steel churches of the motorway. The way you say it how it is. Your Grant and Aneles chattering cosmo gossiping. Your JMPD orange. Your radio stations broadcastings swedish house over frequencies from Benoni to Fourways to H20. To crocodile arenas. To backstage parties. To picnics on rooftops in downtown hipster Arts on Main type spots. Always the alarm bells of electronic synthetic beating. Your massive expanses of car parks. Huge deserts of 6 x 4 white lined spaces. Harbors filled and emptied with the tide of cars and commerce. The cactuses and wimpy dusty quick stops 95 fill it up check the oil and water. Your office parks. The humdrum mines of mouseclicks and desktop computers operated by sweaty Markhams white collars ordering and inboxing and booking Kulula flights to Plett. Your blue light brigades delivering politics and irate newspaper headlines. You wardrobes of khaki and dragon inspired kitsch. The way you like to water the lawn on Saturday mornings. Your love for supplements. Your need for speed and ripped abs and big backs and MTN advertising campaigns and almost fake handbags. Your warm windless weather and golden afternoons promoting post-curricular activities like cricket highlights on Supersport DSTV, affairs and going to GAME to find gas braais. Your smiling jaw boom gates, a frightening welcome at every entrance. The way you laugh so loudly in Woolworths queues. Your Parkhursts, Parkmores, Parktowns, MTB Prawns. Your pothole politics fixing up culture up as we drive along. Your energetic acidic addictive taste for success. The way you disguise your most beautiful girls in Ed Hardy and baseball caps and pink lipgloss. Shrouded like abayas delivering a small town message in big town envelopes of clashing textiles. The way you lock yourself up at night. Your over-burnt coffee that singes my tongue in the mornings. Your thunderstorms clouding up afternoons, an exploding steam of pressure that leads into the evening. You landed here like a golden promise. Like a page that slipped from the Bible. A promised land. Like God’s land. And you claimed up stakes of the Witwatersrand. Mapped up your spaces with RealtyOne and Seeff FOR SALE. Scratching the face of the earth and with axes and picks digging for gold and leopard print. You’re capitalization, globalization, cynicisization, manifestation, mesmerization. Joburg I’m trying so hard to love you but I guess I just don’t understand you.

Heaven & Earth

Andrew Brauteseth — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:00:35 +0000

A Saturday night spent in the Hemel en Aarde valley for @SiWibb’s birthday. Love it here. With friends. Smashing beers, chasing bulls. Thinking about life and art and open space and highs and lows and surfing and beer and #fokkenprawns. And diving in the lake. And waking up with the rain. Also there: @foodie_za @camillacorder @julesdurrant @CaptainBreadZA @VolcanicOJ @cluckhoff @rudi_cronje @donnface @tamsinranger @mshoneybeeCT @verygabby (who did I miss?).

Liberty Leading the People

Andrew Brauteseth — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:03:53 +0000

Liberty Leading the People is my first step into the art world.

You read about the piece and see pics of the exhibition or if you’d like to buy a limited edition print, please email me on andrew@guywithcamera.co.za

Dungeons

Andrew Brauteseth — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 22:03:06 +0000

An almost mythical place. Dungeons. When you hear the name. Blasting windswept mountains of water collapsing on the knees of a misted cliff-face. The Sentinel. That old greying consortium-owned grandfather, watching over surfers with balls the size of Jabulani’s (FIFIA ’10 Matchball) being whipped out over colossal heaves of swell. It’s like a line adapted from a Wilfred Owen World War poem. The young and brave climbing through trenches and into the thundering. Or maybe more like the ending chapters of a greek legend. Odysseus… in surfer stubble… escapes from Cyclops Polyphemus on the west winds and (in slow motion with a deep husky voice over)… into the lair of Laestrygones! But then again, we’re eating biltong and spilling those really great woolies chutney chips all over the deck. The rain is punishing me for something I tweeted last week. I’m trying to twitpic with one frozen shaky hand on a wet blackberry 8590 while keeping my lens out of the storm surge. I refuse to be the first guy to call sick as my stomach hauls me over another 20 feet of ocean. 70-200mm Canon in one hand. 17-22mm intestine in the other. There’s something about surfing that makes me swear a lot. Holy fuckk! But swearing doesn’t do this place justice.

Liberty

Andrew Brauteseth — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:59:23 +0000

A lot has been going on. I’m working on something that’s quite a radical departure from anything I’ve done before. I’ve been wanting to start this project for ages. Well, ever since I returned from Buenos Aires last year after seeing an Alberto Passolini painting at MALBA. It’s a long story, but that’s the moment the jigsaw pieces started fitting together. Like mental Tetris. I can’t say much more about it right now. Well, except that the work raises questions about Liberty. I’ve made this short video as a teaser.

Some people having problems with vimeo, so I’ve also put the clip on youTube here.

Mavericks of Chance

Andrew Brauteseth — Sun, 22 May 2011 20:30:45 +0000

Shoot Day 4. We’ve passed hilarious hour. That hour when everybody is so tired and brain-fried that sentences only arrive via jumbled adjectives and high school girl-giggle. That was 3 hours ago. It’s now 4am. The crew is tired. Really tired. In that late night numbing navy seal on a island mission kind of tired. Trying to be on edge but really wanting to fall into sweet R.E.M. bliss with the sheep and the soft grass and the stars and the… let me stop just there. Late night tiredness is different to normal tiredness. Late night tiredness is a coffee fueled sober drunkenness. It’s like having a full night out in Stellenvagas accompanied by Maties 1st and no brandy. This is the 4th day we’ve been shooting 7pm to 4am on location. Jokes are dry. Throats are dry. Neuron transmitters are dry. I’m shooting on super high ISO’s in almost pitch dark. It’s not easy. Light is scarce because we want that gritty doccie style in the pics so we’re use what little ambient light we find bouncing around. The results look good and I’m loving my primes. The 85mm f1.2 especially. It’s Canon’s fastest piece of glass.

People on set cluster in swarms. Everyone has a swarm. There’s an Art department and Make-Up swarm. A Grip and Gaffer swarm. An Agency swarm. A Models and Actors swarm. I cross the invisible swarm line and try make small talk with the grips. Have I mentioned grips? I love grips. Grips are awesome. Years in the force. Their medals are their stories. Living and breathing soldiers of set. Tying, jumping, lighting, scrimming, propping, rigging, roping, hauling, lolli-popping, three-quarter stop 12ft scrim maxi-brute on the flippen arri 5k heads. Hey lets fokken super-clamp that bliksem. They’re like SWAT but with boeps and camo cargo pant and crocodile clips and afrikaans accents. The agency swarm is young and fun. Apple inter-3G Twitpicing on iPhones and mac pads. Steve Jobs would be proud.

Halo is a ‘brand led communications agency’. Their introduction runs like a dinner party icebreaker, “So an accountant and a lawyer start this advertising agency…” These guys are incredibly smart and have assembled a super talented team who are busy scooping up an impressive client list at lightning pace. The brief from Monte was to change some perceptions around gambling. To help make it a more fun and socially acceptable form of entertainment. Halo crafted a campaign around the concept of life as a gamble. People take small, fun risks in everyday life. So why not take some at Monte?

Shots from the campaign and some final layouts:

Cool people you should follow on twitter:

The guys from Halo, creative director @DeanOelsch and copywriters @MikeOelsch & @MrCBond
Hand-model: @mikesharman
And Spitz, guy with Boom! @soundplusdesign

Credits:
Agency: Halo
Production House: Team Best
Producer: Jo Munnik
Strategy: Interbrand Sampson and Halo, Lara Cassel-Faulks and Dean Oelschig
Creative Director: Dean Oelschig
Art Director: Greg Harrison
Copywriters: Michael Oelschig and Clayton Bond
Agency Producer: Adele Warren
Photographer: Andrew Brauteseth, aka Guy with Camera
Client: Helen Stewart, Linda Wood, Olivia Wallis, Noeleen Bruton from Tsogo Sun / Montecasino

Funk Off

Andrew Brauteseth — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:50:33 +0000

Virgin Active recently asked me to shoot their new FUNK OFF campaign. It’s a new group exercise dance class that they launched which incorporates different styles of dance into an energy intensive workout. We wanted to create images that were really impactful but still had a kind of street-style, ‘improv’, attitude. There needed to be a realness and an edginess about them. By using really a hard light source, the black and white treatment and by casting a group pro dancers (who just had fun dancing to music they loved) we managed to create something really powerful.

Campaign Credits:

Copy – Jeanine Gomes
Art Director – Hylton Revell

The Perfect Portrait

Andrew Brauteseth — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 05:13:29 +0000

I’m not going to write about Susan Sontag and the philosophy of representation. A Portrait like a multiplex mirror, showing many different versions of the self. This is not a socio-cultural piece. Oakley is very well known for their sunglasses, but not as much for their new range of eyepieces. I was asked to shoot portraits of a variety of personalities (seeders) in Joburg and Cape Town who would best represent their brand. Normally if I know somebody personally I have a pretty good idea of the best way to capture them in a photo. For Portrait of a Nation for instance, I try to shoot something very simple that focuses on a persons character and captures something unique about them. If you look at the best portraits people use in magazines or for their profile pictures online, the simplest well lit portraits often work the best. Our aim was also to shoot something that each seeder would want to use for themselves so I had to take a bit of direction from the subjects of what they wanted in terms of poses or expressions. We also kept tight crop on the face or upper body with a simple grungy background. This put the focus on each individual and also really brought out the eyepieces that the seeders had chosen for themselves from the new Oakley range. In a tight crop, the slightest change in expression can change a whole photograph. A big busy day in the Studio is a beautiful thing, especially when mixed with laughter and topped off with champagne.

Vicky Sleet from www.iwantthat.co.za. @iwantthatnow

Chris Moerdyk from Bizcommunity.com. @chrismoerdyk

Ian Martin from New Media Publishing

Another Shot of Ian Martin

Nc Haralambous from SA Rocks @nicharry

Catherine Grenfell from @5fm

Simon Gear. Weather man and presenter on 50/50. @simongear

Tudor Caradoc-Davies, Head of Digital Content at Touchline Media. @tudorCD

Andy Hadfield @andyhadfield

Another shot of Andy

Owen Hannie, sports Presenter on @5fm on The Fresh Drive

Another shot of Owen.

Shaun Bond @shaunfrancbond and @weloverealbeer

Chris choosing which frames suit him Best.

Vicky choosing her Favourites

Catherine Grenfell in Make up.

Mark Stead, CD at Derrick Cape Town, creative pondering. @markstead

Credits:
Client: Oakley South Africa @OakleySA
Agency: Derrick Cape Town
Creative Director from Derrick: Mark Stead @markstead
The Suit: Myles Hoppe @MylesHoppe (MD Derrick Cape Town)

Some Afrikaners Revisited

Andrew Brauteseth — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:03:19 +0000

I have seen a lot of David Goldblatt’s photographs but have never quite grasped his work entirely until I saw this book, ‘Some Afrikaners Revisited’. Goldblatt’s photography forms an intimate glimpse into parts of Afrikaaner culture during an Apartheid South Africa. His photos are subtle and circumspect, and need to be grounded by his concise captions in order to be read and understood. Unfortunately I don’t have the captions, which really explain and anchor each image, so I recommend reading the book – available to order here on Kalahari website for about R340, or your can browse the book where I first saw it, The Book Lounge in Roeland Street, Cape Town. There are also more photographs and captions on the Michael Stevenson website.