Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe

Through photography, writing, and activism, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe transforms the intensely personal into a broader meditation about contemporary society and politics. Moutoussamy-Ashe was raised on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, by an interior designer mother and an architect father, and her understanding of race and class was shaped by the city’s systemic discriminatory practices, which led it to become one of the most segregated in the United States. As she later reflected, Chicago had, “in its own way, a form of apartheid.” After encountering Ernest Cole’s photographs as a student and training in New York with mentors such as Gordon Parks and Garry Winogrand in the early 1970s, Moutoussamy-Ashe traveled to South Africa at the height of apartheid, armed with her camera.

In March 1977, she accompanied her husband, Arthur Ashe, there, as part of a team filming a documentary for ABC on sports and apartheid for American TV audiences. She returned on her own the next year to attend political activist Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s funeral. On these trips, as she visited Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, and KwaZulu-Natal, and the townships of Alexandra, Kliptown, Lenasia, and Soweto, she got to know the country and its people through her lens. Seeking to understand a place both foreign and familiar, Moutoussamy-Ashe focused much of her attention on the everyday; she captured the country’s charged circumstances as well as individuals going about daily life. She was granted special access to various events, including a soccer match at a segregated stadium and Sobukwe’s funeral in Graaff-Reinet. She also documented her encounters with influential figures, including politicians and activists, among them Mangosuthu Buthelezi; Dr. Nthato Motlana and his wife, Sally; Helen Suzman; and Ellen Kuzwayo. In stark black-and-white and in vivid color, Moutoussamy-Ashe’s images offer a distinct perspective from an African American photographer on a turbulent period in South African history.

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe: South Africa 1977/1978, representing the 2024 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize, features more than one hundred of Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photographs from South Africa, many of them never published before. The images are presented together with texts by Candice Jansen, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Leslie M. Wilson, and Ambassador Andrew Young, and an interview with the photographer by Michal Raz-Russo.

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe has produced a body of work that chronicles the Black experience in the United States and beyond, experiments with still lifes and formal abstractions, and engages with the history of photography. Her images have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Ebony, Essence, Life, People, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times, and have been exhibited around the world; her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the author of five books, including Daufuskie Island: Photographs by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, whose twenty-fifth-anniversary edition won the Essence Literary Award in Photography. With her many years devoted to issues in health, the arts, and civil rights, Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photography is interwoven with her activism. She is a director of the Arthur Ashe Endowment for the Defeat of AIDS and serves on the board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and on the President’s Council of the Cooper Union, of which she is a former alumna trustee.