synopsis
With strong memories of my formative years growing up on the edge of the Namib Desert in what was then known as South West Africa, I have returned to explore my obsession with this place and my lifelong curiosity for the notion of shelter. I have covered thousands of dusty kilometres across remote plains, through dry river beds, over sand dunes and salt pans, through conservancies and communal lands to photograph families in desperate, forgotten outposts. I try to capture the ‘transhumance’ – the search for work, forage and water – and the remnants of former habitats alongside once productive land.
In coastal towns I move with women and children across stretches of desert from one garbage dump to another – often with the loot they carry in their quest to create shelter and eke out a living. I focus on human enterprise and failure, on the bare circumstances of ordinary women and men forced to negotiate life, and of an environment in crisis.
Namibia – a nation of diverse peoples and cultures in a vast land of seeming nothingness and unparalleled light – is rapidly shifting towards foreign popular culture. The momentum of urban development has triggered local populations to migrate from rural dwellings to the fringes of urban areas where they have settled on deregulated land – often falling prey to crime, alcoholism and abuse.
This transition of the social landscape is exacerbated by the scarcity of water and the implications of mining in a constantly drought-stricken land. In the desperateness of what is revealed on this landscape, I photograph what I care about – human intrusion, passage, negligence, waste, destruction and intervention.
Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain is about this space, these people, my place among them, and my existence at this time of my life.
Photos of the book
technical information
Publisher : Steidl Verlag
2017
Dimensions : 34 x 24.3 cm
200 pages, 120 images
in english
2017
Dimensions : 34 x 24.3 cm
200 pages, 120 images
in english
about Margaret Courtney-Clarke
Margaret Courtney-Clarke was born in Swakopmund, Namibia in 1949 where she currently lives and works. After studying art and photography in South Africa, she spent the next four decades working as a photographer in Italy, the USA and across Africa.
In 1979 Courtney-Clarke became a persona non grata under the Apartheid laws and renounced her South African citizenship – she would later return to South West Africa under the protection of the United Nations and claim her Namibian citizenship.
Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (2014 - 2018) documents the artist’s return to Namibia and evidences her passionate concern for human enterprise and failure, and for an environment infused with remnants of apartheid as well as hope. 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.”
Throughout her career, Courtney-Clarke has documented female identity in Africa.
Her latest work, When Tears Don’t Matter (2019-2022), traces a journey through the Kalahari in conversation with six of the micro-nation Bushman inhabitants of that area. MacKenny writes “[Courtney-Clarke] has a special eye for the experiences of women who are celebrated here in their role not only as mothers, homemakers, gatherers and nurturers, but individuals who, in later life, hold sovereign dignity as matriarchs; no less regal under their shredded canopies than queens of old.”
Nominations and awards for her photographic publications include: Prix Pictet HOPE (shortlist) 2019; Hundred Heroines: Women in Photography 2020; Contemporary African Photography (CAP) 2019 & 2020 (shortlist); Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 2018 for Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain, Stuttgart, Germany; the 2018 Krasznz-Krausz Book Award (long listed), for Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain, London, UK; Photo District News (PDN) award for A Lifelong Obsession with Finding Shelter, NYC, USA; the 2015 Henri Cartier-Bresson (HBC) nomination for her series On Borrowed Time, Paris, France; 10 Best Books of the Year Award (1994), NY Public Library, USA.
Dedicated publications on Courtney-Clarke’s work include, amongst others - Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (2018); her acclaimed trilogy on the Art of African Women: Ndebele (2002), African Canvas (1990) and Imazighen (1996) as well as several collaborations with Maya Angelou.
When Tears Don’t Matter was published by Steidl in 2022.
More than 200 exhibitions of the photographer’s work have been held around the world.
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Publisher : Steidl Verlag
2017 (1st edition)
2017 (1st edition)