Albert van Rheede van Oudtshoorn was a photographer, received close to 300 awards for his images.
Background
Albert van Rheede van Oudtshoorn was born in 1894 in Aberdeen, Eastern Cape, South Africa.
His early forebear, the Earl of Athlone, a seventeenth-century loyalist to William of Orange, was chosen to be one of seventeen privileged families of Holland in which the title is still handed down to every child. His eighteenth-century ancestor Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn came to South Africa in 1745 as second-in-command to the governor of the Cape, and a village in the Cape bears the family name.
Career
Albert van Rheede van Oudtshoorn became a civil servant in Cape Town, rising to the position of assistant registrar of deeds for Natal province when he moved to Pietermaritzburg years later. He served in the Ninth Infantry Regiment during World War I.
In his later years, Albert van Rheede van Oudtshoorn ceased photographing and turned his attention to astronomy.
Achievements
Membership
A member of the Cape Town Photographic Society as of 1926, Albert van Rheede van Oudtshoorn served on its council as vice-president and as president for thirteen years (from 1930). He became a Fellow of RPS in 1928 and Honorary Fellow in 1937.
Albert van Rheede van Oudtshoorn also received honorary life memberships from the Amsterdam Focus Salon (1936), Pietermaritzburg Photographic Society (1948), Western International Photographic Salon, Bristol (1934), for which he was overseas vice-president, and the Cape Town Photographic Society (1943).
Cape Town Photographic Society
,
Cape Town
1926
Pietermaritzburg Photographic Society
,
Pietermaritzburg
1948
Royal Photographic Society
1928
Amsterdam Focus Salon
1936
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
In the American Annual of Photography, Frank Fraprie describes the pictorialist as "one of the world's greatest exponents of land and seascape photography." Favoring a quarter-plate camera of unknown vintage and a rolliefilm reflex, the incorrigible tinkerer built his own enlarger as well as several darkroom gadgets."
"Dodging was his main stock-in-trade," said Eric Vertue of van Oudtshoom in Camera News.