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African Stories: WHY IS THE WORLD SO BEAUTIFUL? Scrap / Junk cars, Africa, southern Namibia.|| Oberholzer: It's the first day in May. May Day. This is the day I have set aside to liberate myself from one bit of photographic philandering that has resulted in some disturbing environmental graffiti. In Germany, and many other European countries, May Day is celebrated as the beginning of spring. It's 1972 and I am studying photography in Muenchen, Germany. It's also the year of the Olympics and the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. I am on a landscape shoot and find myself exiting the underground at its end stop. Then, in horror, I am surrounded by post war concrete conglomerate of the most ugly high-rise apartment buildings imaginable. Actually---- beyond imagination. Sadly, cloaking and choking this scene is the greyest of murky grey days, probably in the history of modern man. Looking up at the side of one grey building, someone had spray painted in large red letters “Warum isst die Welt so schön?” (Why is the world so beautiful?). This bit of graffiti hit me like a bomb, smashed into my head, and branded itself in my mind forever. I brought that spray painted wall back with me to South of Africa. The memory was so intense that in the years to follow, I always carried a couple of spray-paint cans with me on my African travels. Now here's my confession, my riddance of a sin. In many cases, when faced with man's hideous, ugly destruction of the world's pictorial beauty, I would spray these questioning words. Oh ---Folks, what a pleasurable high that would give me. Sprayed it, I did, on fuel storage tanks, ugly factory walls, the odd crumbling RDP house, dirty abattoir walls, old Apartheid buildings and even once against the security police building in Durban. In a taxi rank in Mthatha, I spotted a huge blank advertising board; probably in waiting for some Rama Margarine add. I put up my photographic ladder and did it right there overlooking the busiest taxi and market area in the Eastern Cape. The delight was, back then, that nobody was really concerned, almost as if I was the official, quirky advertising logo man. The graffiti above was done on a scrap yard in southern Namibia, out there in the beautiful arid landscape. Was this sprayed graffiti just reckless stupidity, a futile question, or a stretched line of humour? Maybe just added pollution, or merely the rebelliousness of youth? I don't know, but I am sorry. I've now stopped doing this but, but in my mind it still brings a smile. ‘Why is the world so beautiful?' (KEYSTONE/LAIF/Obie Oberholzer)