Soft Horses

When the N7 loses its memory at Noordoewer and starts calling itself the B1, you have arrived in Namibia, spacious and still, named after itself. Even if you have never turned left at Keetmanshoop and headed for Luderitz, even if you have never rolled along a road so steeped in silence and yourself that it is hard to remain behind your own eyes, you will i think understand. Even if you have never seen way off on the horizon, which runs as straight as a skirting board, first a cloud of dust and then, straining your eyes in an effort to understand the heavy distance, movement.

Someone told you about them, but you cannot say who. Perhaps it is one of those things that all of us know in ourselves. We need not be told. We understand, as if informed by a whisper, that those are wild horses racing across the floor of the desert, and even though it is impossible, you would see an ungroomed mane thrashing in the wind. Wild horses are much like mixed tenses.

About Stan Engelbrecht

Engelbrecht is a photographer/artist who divides his time between Johannesburg, a small desert town Aus in Namibia, and Cape Town, his base. Born in 1976 in Vredendal, South Africa, he began his photographic journey in Cape Town, where his first major solo show "thecautionhorses" captured the wild horses of the Namibian desert.