Biography
Ken Oosterbroek initially struggled to get his start in photography, going from paper to paper trying to get a job based on photos he'd taken illegally of fellow conscripts during his military service in southern Angola. Years later, in 1989, he achieved his first success, winning the Ilford Award (South African Press Photographer of the Year). In reference to this, he wrote: 'And then in the morning this kind of emptiness or what-now feeling and it just wasn't so important anymore. I've got it, it's history, it's on record and now my head is free of a single-minded one-stop goal. Now I can really let it rip. Will somebody please give me a gap to let it rip? BUT, give me a break to shoot the real thing. Real, happening, life. Relevant work. Something to get the adrenaline up and the eyes peeled, the brain rolling over with possibilities and the potential for powerhouse pictures. I am a photographer. Set me free.' He would be named South African Press Photographer of the Year again by 1991, and in August of that year he was chief photographer at The Star.
Read more about this topic: Ken Oosterbroek
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)