Cuny JanssenThere is something in the air in Prince Albert

“Creaking Groaning Folding Rock … continental lift, tilt and breakup – the beginning of the end for the great continent Gondwana. New mountains form – Swartberge, Witteberge. Extremely old Archaan seabed, layer upon layer of rivers and lake shoved upright – black, brown, pink, rippled rock ridges and walls marching across torn and devasteted landscapes. Eroding floods, mud laden escaping waters tearing across the old glacier produed Dwyka Karoo. Trapping , entombing survivors of the great Permian–Triassic green death, to add another layer to the richest fossil beds in the world. Volcanic devastation and lava flows complete the Karoo rock strata. Our ancient ancestors, leathery brown, hunting and gathering, enter the Karoo with its good years and its bad, its wet and its dry. Eyes across the endless rock, coarse brush, occasional grass and the mighty herds of antelope. Wandering far and wide, prorating the world.” (Text by Craig McEwan)
The young Dutch photographer Cuny Janssen was an assistant to Thomas Struth; she now lives in Amsterdam once more and has just given birth to a daughter (2007), having taken pictures of a primordial, abandoned cosmos during a six-month stay in South Africa and worked them into a book of dreamlike quality, superbly printed and elaborately designed.