Pine Pienaar
Web : www.pinegrovestudios.co.za
Pine lectured photography at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Art and Design for twenty years, teaching students from a wide range of disciplines including graphic design, fine art, full-time commercial and advertising photography as well as videography.
He was also instrumental in founding the photography department at the Port Elizabeth College Art School.
Pine lectured photography at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Art and Design for twenty years, teaching students from a wide range of disciplines including graphic design, fine art, full-time commercial and advertising photography as well as videography.
He was also instrumental in founding the photography department at the Port Elizabeth College Art School.
While lecturing he completed a BTech degree in astronomical photography, thereby combining his love for physics and astronomy with photography.
In 2007 he founded the Pine Grove School of Photography. The school offers a wide range of courses from beginners to advanced as well as regular weekend courses to selected locations in the Karoo heartland and the Amatola Mountains in the Eastern Cape. In 2013 the school also undertook its first overseas photography tour to the Castilla y Leon region in central Spain. The school is currently extending operations to the Gauteng area and will soon offer courses there.
Pine’s work was exhibited widely in art and photography exhibitions. He has appeared on television and in radio talk shows on numerous occasions. Since its inception his school has had four major exhibitions at the ARTEC Gallery in Port Elizabeth.
He is currently working on a coffee table book on what he calls “small histories” – hidden stories rooted in the South African landscape.
He holds that photographers are the keepers of memories. Like Susan Sontag he believes that today everything exists to end in a photograph. He recently explained in a radio interview: “We store these memories on our computers and in the cloud and sometimes forget about them. But when the longing for the past shrouds us like a mist in the valley we go to our screens and dance with the light”.
His easy manner and fluid way of teaching makes him hugely popular and much in demand as a photography lecturer and mentor.
Pine’s interests are wide ranging and include modern art, literature, Greek mythology, astro-physics and geography. Most of the research for his BTech (astronomical photography) was done at the Boyden Observatory. The result is that he regularly teaches astronomy to the public. He is currently also compiling an astronomy short course.
Over the years he has worked in various genres like landscape, theatre, commercial and advertising. Today he mainly photographs people. People have stories and he believes himself to be the epitome of the story man. His characters seldom laugh. They are often portrayed in the dramatic chiaroscuro style of light flowing from the shadows. Because of this his students often refer to him as “the dark man that lives in the shadows and that seeks the light”. His main influence, apart from artists, is the American photographer Irvin Penn.
As a young man he traveled the southern regions of Africa extensively, using Mozambique as a base. He is equally at home in a tent in the African bush, or in a street café in a Spanish village. He enjoys Mediterranean culture and cuisine. He is fascinated by the exotic, easily bored by the mundane, and has been called an incurable romantic. His students invariably go away with far more than the expected.
