Page 15 - Bulletin 7 2003

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attractive shots in his collection, and he also worked in the Malmesbury, Worcester,
Robertson and Swellendam districts. But again, there are tantalising gaps left by

concentrating too much on the ‘pretty picture’ at the expense of a consistent record
of all that he saw – in spite of the occasional less picturesque shot this would have

yielded.

Elliott went to less-known regions still. He took several photographs in charming

Clanwilliam, even today well off the beaten track, and he was the first to record
homesteads in this area, like Kersefontein (Berg River), Blindefontein (Eendekuil) or

Modderfontein (Citrusdal). He went to several fine farms in the Ceres basin –
Schapenrivier, Leeuwenfontein, Matjesrivier and Verlorenvallei – none of them

described in print until three decades after Elliott’s death. In his collection appear

photographs of places as far-flung as George, Knysna, Uitenhage and Graaff-Reinet.
Understandably he left out much more than he covered in these districts, In a way his

colleague Ravenscroft, who made thousands of picture postcards and recorded town

scenes all over the Cape Colony, was a much more systematic worker, though with
little eye for the picturesque or any particular interest in the historical.

In one of his won forewords, Elliott once wrote that he wanted to draw the attention

of South Africans to ‘the finer points connected with the beautiful gabled homesteads
of their forefathers’. Did he manage to let his camera do this? Although Elliott’s

main concern, as we shall see, was clearly the totality, the overall atmosphere of old

Cape architecture, he did often make an effort to record details or special facets of
that architecture. He made interesting series of shots of belltowers, gateways,

parapets, fanlights, mouldings, doorways, pediments, even thatching, and all these
were shown at his later exhibitions. But Elliott did not always adequately record

every building he visited. We need not blame him too much for this; very few other
photographers in this field ever did record much more than the most attractive aspect

of a building. Even in an authoritative work like Pearse’s Eighteenth century

architecture in South Africa, with its detailed measured drawings, too much
emphasis is placed on front elevations only. But it is a fact that needs to be

mentioned in an assessment of Elliott’s work. Perhaps he never quite expected the