Jo Ractliffe: Out of Place
Published by Atelier EXB, Out of Place is the first publication to survey more than four decades of Jo Ractliffe’s photographic practice. Bringing together key bodies of work, the volume examines the landscapes of southern Africa as places where memory, political history, and the lasting consequences of conflict remain inscribed in the terrain.
Working primarily in black and white, Ractliffe photographs roads, abandoned settlements, borderlands, and peripheral spaces shaped by apartheid, war, and displacement. Rather than documenting conflict itself, she focuses on its aftermath, revealing landscapes that function as silent archives of personal and collective memory. Through a restrained visual language, her photographs explore absence, loss, and the enduring relationship between place and history.
The book also includes Ractliffe’s recent series The Garden, together with essays by Pia Viewing, Rory Bester, and Oluremi Onabanjo, as well as short texts by the artist introducing each photographic project.
About the Author
Born in Cape Town in 1961, Jo Ractliffe is a South African photographer whose work has explored the relationship between landscape, memory, and political history since the 1980s. Working primarily in black and white, she is best known for her long-term investigations of places shaped by apartheid, war, and displacement, focusing on the traces that conflict leaves behind rather than on the events themselves.
Her work has been presented in major international institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the International Center of Photography, the Rijksmuseum, and Haus der Kunst. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Alongside her exhibition practice, she has published several acclaimed photobooks, including Terreno Ocupado, As Terras do Fim do Mundo, The Borderlands, Everything is Everything, Signs of Life, Photographs: 1980s–Now, and Being There.
