Witness the timeless spirit of the Karoo.
In Origins - song of Nooitgedacht, a remote valley in the Karoo, British photographer Jennifer Gough-Cooper reveals the creation of a landscape which is quintessentially South African. These remarkable photographs, taken with 35 mm negative film, are the result of her close observation of Nature and of Place, offering us a reflective journey back in time.
Go to LOOK INSIDE for youtube link
http://blog.getaway.co.za/book-reviews/book-review-origins/
Launched in Cape Town (Uitsig, Constantia) and Johannesburg (Everard Read Gallery) in early October, Origins – song of Nootigedacht, a remote valley in the Karoo has been hailed here as ‘... one of the year’s finest visual publications...’ -
Melvyn Minnaar - Weekend Argus - 2 October 2011 - 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 human presence.
Getaway Magazine - Origins – song of Nootigedacht, a remote valley in the Karoo is a coffee-table treasure that seamlessly binds together photography as an art form and the ability of images to reveal the creation of a landscape.
On the pages, Gough-Cooper leaves the images to speak for themselves, lightly peppering some of the spaces between photographs with stream-of-consciousness phrases that serve not to explain the images, but rather to create ones entirely on their own. There is, for the more archaeologically inquisitive, a detailed description of each image neatly packaged as an index at the end of the volume.
A quote that stands isolated on the opening pages sums up Gough-Cooper’s own passion and attention to detail in this work:
‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.’
William Blake
Colin Turpin Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge - This is a book that I will treasure as a vivid and beautiful realisation of the Nooitgedacht valley. She succeeds in capturing the remarkable features of the region, origins, flora, fauna, rock and water. The book is of special interest to me having grown up in the Karoo.
Jennifer Gough-Cooper demonstrates conclusively the complete wrongness of the description one commonly comes across of the Karoo as a desert or semi-desert region
I think the book is a supreme example of the imaginative and artistic use of photography.
Price (includes shipping in South Africa only)
