Page 14 - Bulletin 7 2003

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newly built country residences such as Bartinney and Glenconner, some of which
appear in Stellenbosch 1679 – 1929. Nor are all the other photographs of great

historical interest. He took seemingly endless numbers of shots of places such as
Avontuur and Nooitgedacht, each from a slightly different angle or with different

persons or groups posing in front or on the steps to the loft. After deduction of all

this and of the occasional duplicates, we are left with approximately 1 500 negatives
that form Elliott’s invaluable record of the architectural beauty of the Cape at the

beginning of this century.

A minority of these photographs are not by Elliott himself, but were re-photographed
by him from earlier prints or printed from older negatives, many of them probably

since lost. As these are all from before 1900 and of scenes that had already changed

by the time Elliott saw them – why else would he have bothered to re-photograph
them? – they are included in the Elliott Collection, although they are not always as

clear as originals. I could not resist the temptation to reproduce some of them in this

book; after all, they could also in a way be called Elliott photographs.

Cape Town is fairly well covered by Arthur Elliott; nearly every historic building of
note appears on his negatives, as well as several striking views of streets and squares.

Some of the latter are actually earlier photographs; the consistency of Cape Town’s
th
19 century townscape had already begun to crumble when Elliott started recording
it. One would have liked to see more random street scenes in areas like District Six

or old Wynberg, but then Elliott was not a ‘random’ photographer, and these areas
were not then considered of great historical importance. (To redress this situation, I

have included a small number of early shots of Wynberg and Kalk Bay from the
Archives’ ‘general’ collection, some of which might just be Elliott’s work anyway.)

Elliott was at his best as a photographer of the rustic charm of farmhouses, and very

few of these in the Constantia, Stellenbosch, Somerset West, Franschoek and Paarl

areas were not recorded by his camera, often more than once. But he went farther
afield than almost any other student of Cape architecture at the time: Tulbagh – an

area then more unspoilt than almost any other – features in some of the most