Cuny Janssen: There is something in the air in Prince Albert

The very own abandoned cosmos

"Creaking, groaning, bursting stone ... continental pull, faults and fractures - this was the beginning of the end of the great continent of Godwana. New mountains - Swartberge, Witteberge - formed. Layer after layer of rivers and lakes brought to light the bottom of primeval seas - mountain ridges and rock faces of black and brown stone rose above the broken and devastated surface of the earth. Eroding floods, muddy masses of water inundated the ancient glacier that had formed the Dwyka Karoo. Trapped and buried, they were the only survivors of the great green death from the Permian-Triassic period, which now became another layer in one of the richest fossil deposits on earth. Volcanic eruptions and lava flows have continued to shape the face of the Karoo Mountains. Our ancestors, tough and brown, came as hunter-gatherers, keeping the Karoo wet or dry, in bad times and good. Their eyes always fixed on the timeless stone, the rough bush, the ever growing and withering grass, the vast herds of antelope wandering far and wide to populate the earth."
The young Dutch photographer Cuny Jansen was Thomas Struth's assistant, she now lives in Amsterdam again and has just given birth to a daughter (2007), after taking pictures of her very own, abandoned cosmos during a six-month stay in South Africa and processing them in a dreamlike, very high-quality printed and lavishly designed book.