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, which represents the 2024 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize, features more than one hundred of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photographs from her visits to 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.

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