Biography

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 will be published by Steidl in 2022.

More than 200 exhibitions of the photographer’s work have been held around the world.