Taken after rain along a remote Karoo backroad near Colesberg, Telegraph Road forms part of an extended body of work made during my journeys through the Great Karoo between 2002–2004.

The image is dedicated to the memory of two men deeply connected to that chapter of my life: writer and poet Ruben Mowszowski, whose contemplative prose shaped our collaborative book Karoo Moons, and my old school friend Derek Bezuidenhout, who accompanied me on many of the long road journeys across the interior.

Derek became an integral part of the photographic process — keeping notes, handling film holders, watching the changing weather and light with instinctive attentiveness.

Ruben meanwhile understood something elemental about the Karoo itself: its silence, distance, melancholy, and strange spiritual gravity.

Here, after rain, the last light catches the telegraph poles as they recede across the darkening plain — fleeting vertical markers within an immense landscape falling back into shadow.

As Ruben once wrote:

“And this which is not seen, felt, smelled, touched or heard is the secret that can reduce you to tears, or you might simply disappear into the enfolded light.”  — Ruben Mowszowski

TELEGRAPH ROAD
Colesberg, South Africa, 2004
Archival Pigment Print
Edition of 5