By Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe
Publisher: Steidl
Publication date: 2025
Print length: 240 pages
Language: English
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Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe: South Africa, 1977/78 invites us on a journey into a turbulent chapter of history — through the lens of an American photographer whose own experiences of race and segregation in Chicago informed her view. In a period marked by oppression and resistance, she returned to South Africa at the height of apartheid, carrying her camera as a tool of witness, empathy, and solidarity.
Her photographs, taken between 1977 and 1978, traverse cities and townships — Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal, and communities such as Soweto, Alexandra or Kliptown. She gained rare access to everyday life, public events, and powerful moments of activism; in doing so, she documented both sorrow and defiance, hardship and human dignity. The result is a visual archive that does more than record: it humanizes a people under duress and restores to them identity, agency, and presence.
Rendered in stark black-and-white alongside vivid color, the images resist romanticism or simplification. They reflect a land divided — by politics, by history, by violence — but also a land inhabited by individuals whose lives continued: working, loving, gathering, resisting. Through her gaze, Moutoussamy-Ashe reveals the texture of existence under apartheid: its contradictions, its tragedies, its fragile hopes.
More than a historical document, this book stands as a meditation on memory, race, and solidarity across continents. Coming from a photographer shaped by both American segregation and global Black experience, the collection resonates with a universal urgency: that suffering, injustice, and resistance must be seen. It situates personal history beside collective struggle, reminding us that photography has the power not just to show — but to connect, to question, to remember.
In opening these pages, one does not simply view photographs. One witnesses lives, hears silences, feels passing moments of fear, pride, sorrow — and emerges with a deeper understanding of the resilience of the human spirit.