Mount Nelson ─ Rosie Marks

A photobook portraying Mount Nelson through memory, humour and a close attention to the people who animate its everyday rituals.

Mount Nelson is a photobook by British photographer Rosie Marks, produced as part of Belmond’s ongoing series of artist books created in collaboration with contemporary photographers. For this volume, Marks photographed Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town in spring 2023 and winter 2024, bringing together personal memory, affection and her characteristically earthy humour.

Marks remembered seeing the hotel’s iconic pink walls as a child while travelling in South Africa with her family. Returning years later, she turned her attention not only to the rooms and grounds but especially to the staff who have long worked there, looking proudly out from windows and offices. Their portraits offer glimpses into the hotel’s daily life, while also revealing how work routines are bound up with ritual and community, with morning briefings often ending in prayer and song. Marks’s images are as much about her subjects as they are about her own sensibility, finding the comic, the singular and the quietly extraordinary in forms of human presence that are often overlooked.

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Title: Mount Nelson
Artist: Rosie Marks
Publisher: RVB Books, 2024
Format: Embossed and printed linen hardcover, case binding
Size: 240 × 168 mm
Pages: 112
Language: English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 978-2-492175-45-9