Page 10 - Bulletin 7 2003

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so of the Morrison Collection. The latter largely consists of the selection from
Elliott’s work made by W R Morrison for the fourth exhibition held in 1930. Many

of them are duplicates of negatives in the Elliott Collection, but there are also a
number that do not appear there, yet are certainly by Elliott. Several of these have

been included in this book.

It is unlikely that Elliott’s recording activities ever went much further than the taking

of photographs and – at best – providing these with the briefest of captions, for at
least some of the material would have survived. It is amazing that a man with

Elliott’s reputedly alert mind, and with the persistence of which his collection bears
evidence, did not make any field notes of names of farms and their occupants, of

dates or initials on gables, of groundplans or interiors of houses – particularly as his

studies suggest that he must often have spent hours waiting for optimal lighting
conditions. His photographs are all undated, and the negative numbers are not in

chronological order; nor, for that matter, are they thematically arranged. Only

sometimes can a clue as to the date of a photograph be had from the fact that it was
shown at a particular exhibition. Equally tantalising are the many photographs of rare

Cape furniture, silver or porcelain without so much as an indication of their
whereabouts or owners. Elliott apparently let his camera do all the recording work

for him. For his exhibitions he obtained the help of more scholarly people like Theal,
Cory, Graham Botha, Jeffreys, Morrison, De Kock or Kendall to write captions or

prefaces to his pictures; however, these do not appear with the negatives in his

collection but only in the exhibition catalogues – all now rare Africana – while the
catalogue numbers never correspond with the present negative numbers.

Ten thousand photographs, then, and only that; what value have they, apart from

being a convenient source of illustration material for a wide range of subjects?
Numerically one of the largest sections in Elliott’s collection is his reproductions of

‘pictorial Africana’: of art works by earlier artists. There is no doubt that during his

time and even later, these reproductions served a useful purpose. The original prints,
drawings or paintings were often widely dispersed, and in this way they could be

studied, compared and used to illustrate the history of South Africa, both in books