Little did I know that the “old man”, Dotman Pretorius, who captured a photograph of a group of course goers during the mid-1980s, which I was part of, would become a personal research subject some 40 years down the line. Dotman would have been in his late 60s at the time he captured this particular photograph.
When capturing the photograph, he used old-fashioned flashlight technology. I was so intrigued by this, that I asked him whether I may have the large blue glass bulb that he used to produce the flashlight. He happily parted with the unusable item, an item which still features in my photographic collection.
Four decades later, in a Johannesburg-based book shop, I stumbled upon a number of good quality and unique photographs of various themes captured by Dotman Pretorius. Those that initially attracted my attention were the photographs taken by him at Pretoria’s Capitol Theatre during the 1950s.
Opening evening of a 1955 British movie “Geordie” at the Pretoria Capitol theatre during 1956. The movie entails a Scotsman who competes in the summer Olympics, therefore the presence of the pipe band. The theatre, on Parliament Street...
