MARGARET COURTNEY-CLARKE

- FRAIL AND FLOWERING 

4 - 27 September

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In celebration of Cape Town Photo Festival 2025: Frail and Flowering, Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s solo photographic exhibition opens at Artvark Gallery on the 4th September 2025 at 18:00.

Curated by Virginia MacKenny, the title of the show was taken from a photograph Courtney-Clarke took by the same name.

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6 September: 11:00 - 12:00 

Walkabout with Margaret Courtney-Clarke

 

10 September: 13:00 - 14:00 at 6 Spin Street Gallery

TALK. 'Collaborations with Margaret Courtney-Clarke' Emeritus Associate Professor Virginia MacKenny talks about her collaborations with, and the practice of the award-winning Namibian photographer, Margaret Courtney-Clarke. 

 

11 September: 18:00 - 20:00 DINNER TALK. 'Conversations Across Place - A Practice of Engaging' presented by Virginia MacKenny'

Admission is free. Book for Dinner with Kalkbay Courtyard - 021 788 8590

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Created at a time in her photographic career when she was struggling with a cancer diagnosis and the toll of chemotherapy, she ventured into the Namib desert by herself, seeking—she did not know what. Near the Kuiseb River, she came across Nicotiana glauca – a wild tobacco plant. Alone, thin and bowed under the weight of leaves, its branches stood out with bright yellow flowers. Encountering the hardiness of the tobacco plant in one of Namibia’s most arid landscapes gave Courtney-Clarke hope and courage. This became emblematic of her personal fight for survival as well as that of other beings she would come across on her travels.

She has focused her lens on Southern Africa’s most marginalised group, the San or ‘shadow’ people, who are interconnected through land dispossession and injustices both historical and present. With the notion of ‘return’ at its core, Courtney-Clarke’s practice pushes her to travel through some of Namibia’s most unforgiving terrains where she has made friends. Over years of returns, reconnections, and documentation, she has witnessed the landscape change.

Frail and Flowering is a unique opportunity to view a crisp selection of iconic works spanning 40 years of engagement with landscapes and peoples from across the continent, lensed by Courtney-Clarke. This iteration of Frail and Flowering holds a delicate shift where Courtney-Clarke’s earlier works have been reimagined through splicing, cutting, painting and collage; summoning visions shaped from the old and breathing in new life.

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In his foreword to the book, 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.”

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Margaret Courtney-Clarke is a photographer whose aim is to bring historically situated socio-political injustices to light, educate (where governments and press have failed), and celebrate the resilience and creative impulse in the practices of women in the African context. Believing in the importance of ongoing relational conversations, her work now focuses on engagement with people and the environment in crisis in her home country of Namibia.

Courtney-Clarke began her career working under Italian photographer and filmmaker Pasquale De Antonis, photographing art, architecture and antiquities, thereafter freelancing on magazine assignments in Europe and Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1979 Courtney-Clarke became persona non grata under the Apartheid laws and renounced her South African citizenship – later returning to South West Africa, asserting her Namibian birthright under the protection of the UN.

Author of 10 books, Courtney-Clarke’s work has received regular acclaim. Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain received a number of nominations and awards, including the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (longlisted) in London, UK; the silver award from Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, Stuttgart, Germany; the 16th Julia Margaret Cameron Award (Worldwide Photo) Women Seen by Women, Spain (2021). In 2022, Courtney-Clarke received the Lens Culture Critics Choice award for her series Caged, from the Namib Desert. In the same year British Journal of Photography and 1854, Decade of Change 2022, single image winner for Singing the Rain.

In 2019, she was selected for the Prix Pictet global award in photography and sustainability – the exhibition HOPE toured globally with exhibitions in London, Tokyo, Zurich, Moscow, Verona, Dublin and Shanghai, amongst others. In 201,9 she was shortlisted for the Contemporary African Photography Prize (CAP) – and was nominated again in 2020. For her portfolio, A Lifelong Obsession with Finding Shelter in New York City, USA, she received the Photo District News (PDN) Award in 2018, and she was nominated for the 2015 Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB) Award for her series On Borrowed Time in Paris, France.

This recognition has led to invitations for exhibitions which include curator Ekow Eshun’s Face to Face, on public display in King’s Cross Tunnel in London (2020) & Guernsey Photo Festival, U.K. (2021); Women on Women: Relationships, Identity and Power Explored Through Photography, curated by Robert Taylor, Oxford Outdoor Photo, London (2021); and Crossing Night: Regional Identities x Global Context, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, USA (2019); North East South West: Over the Edge, curated by Francesco Finotto, Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, San Donà di Piave, Venice, Italy (2022). In 2018, the Royal Photographic Society named her as one of The Hundred Heroines.

In 2021, Courtney-Clarke presented a solo exhibition When Tears Don’t Matter at !Khwa ttu San Heritage Centre in Yzerfontein, South Africa.

Her forthcoming book of the material therein, documenting the precarious lives of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, will be available Spring of 2023 (Steidl.de). Courtney-Clarke received Diplomas in Graphic Design and Photography (1971) at the then Technikon Natal (now Durban University of Technology), Durban, South Africa, and then enrolled at Scuola Libera di Roma in Rome, Italy, in 1974 to study drawing and anatomy.

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She obtained her Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Photojournalism at New York University (NYU), New York in 1978. Spending more than four decades working as a photographer between Italy, the USA and across the African continent, she freelanced for magazines such as Life, Geo, Stern, Attenzione, Newsweek and Architectural Digest.

Particularly focused on women’s creative practice, she worked on several collaborations with Maya Angelou. Her acclaimed trilogy: Ndebele (1986), African Canvas (1990) and Imazighen (1996) has been exhibited in over two hundred museums across the USA, Africa, Europe and Japan. The trilogy is shortly to be republished by Steidl as a collector’s edition with new material from Courtney-Clarke’s travel notebooks.

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