Drawn to the symbolic resonance of shelters, Margaret Courtney-Clarke has long documented expressions of belonging across the African continent, from Ndebele homesteads to Berber communities, Mauritanian houses and dwellings in Ghana. She takes as subject the continent’s diverse decorative traditions, where object and building are reimaged as canvas. As documents, her photographs have assumed the responsibility of archive, capturing vanishing vernacular forms and old customs eclipsed by globalism’s ineluctable spread. Indeed, Courtney-Clarke’s work has become as much a celebration of the decorative arts, as it is an elegy to its slow fading. The ways of life she photographed were “disappearing rapidly, as if a door – synchronized to my shutter speed – was closing after each exposure.” Her images, however, are without nostalgia for an imagined past idyll. Instead, she attains, as fellow photographer David Goldblatt wrote, “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.”