South Africa, 1977/78

Through photography, writing, and activism, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe transforms the personal into a broader meditation on contemporary society and politics. Raised on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, Moutoussamy-Ashe’s understanding of race and class was shaped by the city’s systemic discriminatory practices; as she later reflected, Chicago had, “in its own way, a form of apartheid.” After encountering Ernest Cole’s photographs and training 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 TV documentary on sports and apartheid. She returned alone the next year for political activist Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s funeral. Visiting 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 captured the country’s charged circumstances as well as individuals going about daily life. She gained special access to various events and documented encounters with influential figures, among them Mangosuthu Buthelezi; Dr. Nthato Motlana and his wife Sally; Helen Suzman; and Ellen Kuzwayo. In stark black-and-white and vivid color, Moutoussamy-Ashe’s images offer a distinct perspective from an African American photographer on a turbulent period in South African history. This publication, representing the 2024 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize, features more than 100 of Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photographs, many never published before.