JEANNE MOUTOUSSAMY-ASHE, South Africa, 1977/1978

237pp., b/w & colour illus., hardback, Steidl & The Gordon Parks Foundation, Göttingen & Pleasantville, 2025

ISBN: 9783969994726

This publication represents 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.

In March 1977 African American photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, Chicago) accompanied her husband, tennis player Arthur Ashe, on a visit to South Africa, as part of a team filming a TV documentary, Arthur Ashe in South Africa - apartheid and sports. She returned alone the next year for political activist Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s funeral and visited Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal, and the townships of Alexandra, Kliptown, Lenasia and Soweto. She also documented encounters with influential figures, among them Mangosuthu Buthelezi; Dr. Nthato Motlana and his wife Sally; Helen Suzman; and Ellen Kuzwayo.

INlcudes texts by Candice Jansen, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., and Ambassador Andrew Young, and an interview with the photographer by Michal Raz-Russo.