Right now, there are parts of the South African veld in full bloom. It’s mostly the result of a good winter, welcome rain and other weather blessings.
Fields and valleys that for many years can be dusty and dull as desert are dressed in paradise shades of green. In many remote crannies and extended fields of flower are carpeting the landscape.
The isolated region to which Jennifer Gough-Cooper took her camera for one of the year’s finest visual publications also goes through the variations of season and multi-annual cycles. The joy of Origins – Song of Nooitgedacht is that it takes us to that distant place in the Karoo, but also far beyond, to something we can vaguely designate as our “origins” defined and enclosed by magnificent geography, its fauna and flora and just a touch of a human presence.
There are many ways of looking at and considering the images that make up this book by the British photographer that is just hitting the bookshops.
On the face of it, there is the beauty of the natural environment that she recorded, showcasing its elegance with minimal interference and no visual artifice. But there is also the compelling visual draw of majestic landscape – the one theatre that has held locals and world travellers enthralled for centuries. And inspired hundreds of artists.
Cleverly, Gough-Cooper deals with both the wide and panoramic, as well as the intimate and close-up. The latter often puzzles the eye and mind as bubbly stream turns into confusing abstract pattern, or rock surfaces take on imagery from other disciplines such as microbiology. These are visual paradoxes that underpin the lyrical framework she sets with words and quotations.
The 92 colour photographs in the finely printed book are presented in the spirit of a song with various sections comprising fragments of texts, quotations from poems. These form a melodic line which guides the viewer by – as Gough-Cooper writes – “evoking these natural treasures in tempo with the slow cycles of infinite time at Nooitgedacht: a place truly beyond imagination”.
The remote valley of the essay lies about 40km due east of the Great Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet. Nooitgedacht is the name of an old 1819 farmstead which stands across the Melk river near a settlement once named Petersburg. Now part of a farm named Asanta Sana, a few of the old buildings, including the church and school remain in repair.
Gough-Cooper’s first visit to the valley was in 2002 and she was captivated by the tranquil landscape with its majestic mountains, great vistas, its transparent streams, turbulent flood waters and the exquisite detail of its rock and flora.
“One day, certain individual rocks in the landscape caught my attention. The surface of a boulder resembled our planet as one might imagine it in its molten state straight from the fire of creation. Another was scribbled with lines by a mysterious wayward writer. Yet another was host to such an incredible pattern of fiery lichen, it appeared like a painting of galaxies travelling in infinite space.”
She said she realised the valley was defined by rock, “the ancient bones of the earth, and blessed with life-giving, pure waters flowing from the mountains – the story that I have endeavoured to describe with my camera”.
Since her first visit to South Africa as a child, Gough-Cooper has held onto the close attachments here. Brought up in England, she studied at Hornsey College of Art in the 1960s.
Later she worked as an exhibition organiser. She was involved in the Marcel Duchamp retrospective that formed the inaugural show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977. Her research of the artist culminated in the book Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, published for the retrospective exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1993.
During an extended visit to Cape Town in 1998, she conceived her first exhibition at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. This comprised black and white photographs taken in the garden – a show that later travelled to the National Botanic Garden of Wales.
Other publications include Paths with the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay and Apropos Rodin, inspired by the sculpture and its setting in the Musée Rodin in Paris, which was published in 2006. - Sunday Argus
l Origins: Song of Nooitgedacht is published by Wild Almond Press and will be launched in Cape Town on October 12 and distributed by Print Matters. For availability contact [email protected] or call 021 789 0155.