"Terreno Ocupado" by Jo Ractliffe - [senior lecturer at the Wits (University) School of Art]

LIMITED EDITION OF 1000 COPIES, Warren Siebrits, Johannesburg, 2008, hardcover, special binding, large format, no dust jacket, condition: very good.

"Terreno Occupado" traced the routes of the Border War fought by South Africa in Angola through the 1970s and 80s. "Terreno Ocupado," focuses on Luanda five years after the country's civil war ended.

Jo Ractliffe is a South African photographer and teacher working  both Cape Town and Johannesburg.

, Ractliffe's photography spans many subjects, but focuses on exploring a specific subject (such as her collection of unpublished images spanning about 25 years: Everything is Everything) or complex landscapes (such as her collection The Borderlands). According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ractliffe has directed her camera toward landscapes to address themes of displacement, conflict, history, memory, and erasure.[8] Ractliffe has been described as "a documentary photographer who captures the traces of violence, displacement and struggle in a landscape." Her images evoke memory, history, and the aftermath of conflict. Her work engages with the remnants of conflict, visible as scars in the landscape.

"Ractliffes photographs have a silent emptiness to them, where the rocky desert and scrub forest stand mute in the face of history. Her pictures document mass graves, minefields, abandoned crops, ambush sites, improvised memorials, trench systems, and dusty battlefields, singling out some small marker or piece of evidence in the otherwise indifferent landscape."