Gelatin silver print
Not on view
Moutoussamy-Ashe traveled to Johannesburg in 1977 to shoot stills for a documentary, but she also took the opportunity to make her own photographs while there. She later recalled: “I doubt I would have known much about life in South Africa and its apartheid system if I had not been informed by the powerful images in Ernest Cole’s book. In spite of my growing up on the South Side of Chicago while segregation was being enforced in much of the country, it was shocking and incomprehensible that human beings were so utterly denigrated, stripped of basic human rights and dignity. . . . Those images stayed with me forever and encouraged me in my personal exploration of how photographs can tell stories.”
2023
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Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe
American, born 1951 25 works onlineAs Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe walked in downtown Johannesburg in March 1977, she saw a white woman and a Black man approaching one another from opposite directions on the same sidewalk, about to cross each other’s paths in front of a church.
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