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Henry Leutwyler is certainly no stranger to the art of ballet-for many years he photographed on stage and behind the scenes at the New York City Ballet, culminating in his book Ballet, since published by Steidl in two editions. Yet Misty Copeland pushes Leutwyler's vision into a new direction: neither a strict portrait of the renowned ballerina nor a mere documentation of her exceptional craft, this is an intimate collaboration between photographer and subject that explores the subtleties of Copeland as a performer, person, persona and idol.Born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in San Pedro, California, Copeland's biography has all the arc of a fairy tale: she was living in a shabby hotel room, struggling with five siblings for a place to sleep on the floor, when she began ballet studies at the late age of 13. She soon proved a prodigy: within three months of her first class she was dancing en pointe, in just over a year she was performing professionally. In 2015 she became the first African-American woman appointed principal dancer at the prestigious American Ballet Theatre in the 75 years of its existence. In Copeland's own words: "The path to your success is not as fixed and inflexible as you think."

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.Largely invisible to the outside world, the bushmen today are dispossessed of their land: a "shadow people" sidelined by officialdom, economic inequity and outdated mythologies which present them as living in an "uncontaminated" state. In this complex country where notions of truth and objectivity (and whiteness) are constantly explored, the battle against disenfranchisement is largely unsuccessful. Courtney-Clarke's photographs lie at the crossroads between documentary and activism, and their basis is an unfailing empathy with her subjects-in her words: "What is crucial in this work is to give place to a voice in search of a listener."