Margaret Courtney-Clarke was born in Namibia in 1949. After studying art
and photography in South Africa, she spent the next four decades working as a
photographer between Italy and the USA and across the African continent. Drawn
to remote places, Courtney-Clarke has produced numerous award-winning books and
her work has been exhibited and collected worldwide.
Courtney-Clarke’s eight major publications to date include her trilogy on
the Art of African Women: Ndebele (1986), African Canvas (1991)
and Imazighen (1996). They were translated into five languages, and
enjoyed multiple editions and reprints for 20 years.
A Steidl publication entitled Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain
(2017) marks a new phase in Courtney-Clarke’s photography. When she returned to
re-establish a home in Namibia in 2009, the landscape once so familiar to her
was undergoing rapid transformation, with intense rural–urban migration by
those in search of a better life. In Cry Sadness, Courtney-Clarke turns her
lens on the aspirations of the poor in their search for human dignity, on their
quest for shelter in a ravaged land and on the environment in crisis. In his
foreword to the book, David Goldblatt writes “[the photographs] are eloquent of
raw existence and offer faint glimmers of hope, of life scratched from an
appallingly inhospitable terrain in the face of overwhelming societal
transition. Yet these photographs attain a searing grace which is in no sense
false to the reality but is, on the contrary, a rare synthesis of what is there
with an intensely heightened and uncompromisingly honest vision”. website
All images © Margaret Courtney Clarke
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