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 ongoing relational conversations her work now focuses on the engagement with a people and 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 Apartheid laws and renounced her South African citizenship – later returning to South West Africa asserting her Namibian birthright under the protection of the UN. 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. Author of 10 books Courtney-Clarke’s work receives regular international acclaim. She is nominated for the 2015 Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB) Award for her series On Borrowed Time in Paris, France. For her portfolio A Lifelong Obsession with Finding Shelter in New York City, USA she receives the Photo District News (PDN) Award in 2018 and, notable among her publications, Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (Steidl, 2018) receives the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (longlisted), in London, UK; and the silver award from Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, Stuttgart, Germany. In that same year the Royal Photographic Society names her as one of their Hundred Heroines. In 2019 she is selected as a finalist for the Prix Pictet award in photography and sustainability - the exhibition HOPE, tours globally with exhibitions in London, Tokyo, Zurich, Moscow, Verona, Dublin and Shanghai amongst others. In 2019 she is shortlisted for the Contemporary African Photography Prize (CAP) - and is nominated again in 2020. In 2021, Courtney-Clarke presents a solo exhibition When Tears Don’t Matter at !Khwa ttu San Heritage Centre in Yzerfontein, South Africa (her eponymous book of the material therein documenting the precarious lives of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert is forthcoming from Steidl) and she receives the 16th Julia Margaret Cameron Award (Worldwide Photo) “Women Seen by Women”, Spain (2021). In 2022 the Lens Culture Critics Choice award is given for her series Caged, from the Namib Desert and in the same year the British Journal of Photography and 1854, Decade of Change 2022, name her the single image winner for Singing the Rain. This recognition has led to invitations for exhibitions which include Crossing Night: Regional Identities x Global Context, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, USA.(2019); 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 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 2024 Francisco Carolinum, OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH, Linz, Austria invites her for a solo - Dust on the Wind, curated by Virginia MacKenny. 2025 sees her Geographies of Drought win an open call competition to represent Namibia at REM – Reiss Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany. Part of a twin-city project in conversation with Windhoek, Namibia the exhibition returns home to be exhibited there in 2026.