Margaret Courtney-Clarke

Following her 2017 book Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain, Margaret Courtney-Clarke (born 1949) now turns her lens to the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. The inspiration for When Tears Don’t Matter comes, in part, from her grandfather’s photographs of almost a century earlier during his mandate as Secretary for South West 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invisible to the outside world, the bushmen today are dispossessed of their land, sidelined by economic inequity and outdated mythologies that present them as living in an “uncontaminated” state.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.

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.