An artistic appraisal of Margaret Courtney-Clarke's work would have to encompass a multiplicity of considerations. In addition to aesthetics, of which Clarke's photographs certainly do not neglect, Clarke's work comprises intimations into individuals. Her photographs create single frame stories of resiliency, of cultural and artistic contentment amidst the threats of cultural subversion from the West. Within her photographs are unabashed subjects, vulnerable in their own persons to the camera without ostentatious affectations.
Courtney-Clarke herself was born and raised in Namibia. Her peculiar origins as a Namibian-born photographer give her the empirical experience needed to fully interpret her subjects first as African women in their own cultural setting, a necessity if cultural devotion is to precede artistic interpretation. It seems Clarke would agree with writer Erskine Caldwell, who wrote that in order to create something true and believable, “You have to know people themselves, and be able to believe in these people...If you do not believe in them, if you think they are just characters to manipulate...you end up with nothing.” Clarke manages to shroud these rich rural traditions in aesthetically symmetrical portraitures, refusing to let her work become aesthetic pornography. Her images pay a humble and fractional homage to the rich and exhaustive cultural and artistic traditions imbedded within the daily lives of rural African women. She views the women through her lens as artists in their own right, preserving a way of life and commitment to artistic beauty, often in the face of ongoing social, political, and economic disruption and upheaval.
To briefly move in another direction in hopes of a better understanding of Clarke's subjects, I'd like to contrast ideal conceptions of democracy and education, with a generalized account of the education provided by colonial domination. The implications of Clarke's photographs for my personal understanding of ideal democracy and education can be complemented by the thoughts of Bertrand Russell, who contests that the goal of education is “to give a sense of the value of things other than domination,” and to encourage a combination of citizenship with liberty and individual creativeness. In Russell's point of view, these ideas if implemented could produce free human beings whose values are equality, cooperation, and participating to achieve common goals. Adam Smith, the humanist and pre-capitalist thinker, agrees with Russell in that he praises the basic human right to creative work, denouncing the “new spirit of the age,” which is: gain wealth, forgetting all but self.
Colonial domination in Africa was produced by this same spirit, embodied within the pathological entities who claimed to be forerunners of democracy. What colonizers claimed as liberation from African spiritual slavery came along with enslavement of another kind: the double edged sword of collusion between succesively oppressive regimes and those believing the Kingdom of God could only come in the form of African cultural dissipation. Thankfully, Courtney-Clarke's photographs provide insights into those whose lives are shaped around creative work, something colonizers never could have brought them nor taken away.
Art's potential as a singular means for subsistence in maintaining wholeness on the individual level is written in the visual vocabularies of the “work” of the Ndebele and Imazighen women: a hand-carved ladder, hand-died fabrics, intricately designed and painted patterns covering the entirety of homes; This is perhaps the only education that fosters these closely-knit communities who have managed to preserve lives undeprived of artistic and aesthetic nourishment. These women seem to be whispering “I need beauty in my life. It is so much a part of me that I cannot separate my work from my art.” Perhaps it is these women who in the midst of seeming domination, truly understand the meaning of education and democracy.
