Following Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (Steidl, 2017), which documents the seared landscapes of the Namib Desert and was shortlisted for the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 18|19, Margaret Courtney-Clarke 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 in this book. 10,000 kilometers of formidable terrain takes Courtney-Clarke across remote bushveld, sand and salt pans to drought-stricken conservancies, tenuous farming communities that function as holding tanks for “inconvenient indigenes,” “cultural villages” and peri-urban squatments, as far east as she could travel through the Namibian Kalahari Desert.