Margaret Courtney-Clark: Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain

Description

This book is Margaret Courtney-Clarke's visual ode to her home country of Namibia, and describes the bare circumstances of ordinary Namibians, of women and men forced to negotiate ravaged lives. Returning to Namibia in 2009 after decades of living abroad, Courtney-Clarke encountered a changed country in the throes of unrestrained development, the Namib Desert desecrated, and peoples migrating from rural settlements to towns in search of a better life. "With strong memories of my formative years growing up on the edge of the Namib Desert," she recalls, "I have returned to explore my obsession with this place and my lifelong curiosity for the notion of shelter." These photos are the result of Courtney-Clarke's travels over 30,000 kilometers across dusty plains, sand dunes and salt pans, through conservancies, homelands and forgotten outposts. They evidence her passionate concern for human enterprise and failure, and for an inhospitable environment infused with remnants of apartheid as well as hope.

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 in Italy, the USA and across Africa before returning to Namibia in 2009. Courtney-Clarke's work demonstrates her particular dedication to rural cultures threatened by modernization and consumerism. Her publications include the acclaimed trilogy of Ndebele (1986), African Canvas (1990) and Imazighen (1996), as well as several collaborations with Maya Angelou.

The photographs are bare of nostalgia, fat or facile certainties. They 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.--David Goldblatt "Aperture"