Margaret Courtney-Clarke: When Tears Don't Matter

Margaret Courtney-Clarke (born 1949) turns her lens to the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. The inspiration for this book, comes in part from her grandfather's photographs of almost a century earlier during his mandate as Secretary for Southwest Africa (now Namibia), some of which are reproduced here. More than 6,000 miles of formidable terrain takes Courtney-Clarke across bushveld, sand and salt pans to drought-stricken conservancies, farming communities that function as holding tanks for “cultural villages” and peri-urban squatments. Largely invisible to the outside world, the bushmen today are dispossessed of their land, side-lined by economic inequity, and outdated mythologies that present them as living in an “uncontaminated” state. Courtney-Clarke's photographs lie at the crossroads between documentary and activism.