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Imazighen: The Vanishing Traditions of Berber Women
Margaret Courtney-Clarke
Imazighen: The Vanishing Traditions of Berber Women is Margaret Courtney-Clarke's luminous photographic record of the domestic arts of the Amazigh (Berber) women of North Africa—the pottery, weaving, rugs, and painted house walls of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The final volume in her trilogy on the traditional arts of African women, it gathers some 230 color photographs of startling intimacy: intricate wall designs, serene rug patterns, and the women themselves at their kilns and looms or pausing for a portrait. A narrative by the journalist Geraldine Brooks accompanies the images, stressing the hard lives many of these women lead and the resilience and love of color that survives in their craft. The book is both a celebration and an elegy—a record of beauty made by hand in a world being swept away by modernity and conflict. For readers drawn to textiles, North Africa, or women's art, it's a moving and gorgeous document.
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The author
Margaret Courtney-Clarke is a Namibian-born photographer known for her trilogy documenting the traditional arts of African women, of which Imazighen is the final volume. The book's text is by Geraldine Brooks, the Australian-American journalist and later Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist.
The book
Published by Clarkson N. Potter in 1996, Imazighen: The Vanishing Traditions of Berber Women pairs some 230 color photographs of Amazigh (Berber) women's pottery, weaving, and wall painting across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia with Brooks's narrative on their lives and traditions.
How to read it
As a photographic elegy. The images carry the book; Brooks's essays supply the human and political context, including the pressures—modernization, warfare—that were eroding these craft traditions.
For more context
Read alongside Courtney-Clarke's earlier volumes Ndebele and African Canvas on other African women's arts.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Margaret Courtney-Clarke
- Publisher
- Clarkson N. Potter
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1996
- ISBN
- 0-517-59771-3
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
Essays by Geraldine Brooks