PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 14.25 x 10.25 in. / 200 pgs / 109 color / 11 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 1/23/2018
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 204

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783958292536 FLAT40
List Price: $85.00 CDN $112.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

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STEIDL

Margaret Courtney-Clarke: Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain

Foreword by David Goldblatt. Text by Sean O’Toole.

This book is Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s (born 1949) 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.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Aperture

David Goldblatt

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.