Origins – Song of Nooitgedacht by Jennifer Gough-Cooper

(Wild Almond Press, R499)

Origins – Song of Nooitgedacht 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.

British photographer Jennifer Gough-Cooper explores the ancient valley of Nooitgedacht in the Karoo through the lens of a 35-millimetre film camera. The resulting images paw at, reveal and ultimately expand the valley’s history from its smallest detail to its most sweeping landscape. The 92, full-colour photos are presented in the spirit of a song and attempt to evoke the Karoo’s natural treasures with the same tempo of the valley’s steady, seemingly infi nite cycle of time.

Gough-Cooper leaves the images to speak for themselves, lightly peppering some of the spaces between photographs with stream-of-consciousness phrases that illustrate Nooitgedacht’s landscape in a unique, personal way. There is, for the more archaeologically inquisitive, a detailed description of each image neatly packaged as an index at the end of the volume.

This book was reviewed by Tyson Jopson.