THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION / STEIDL BOOK PRIZE
NOW AVAILABLE.
Through photography, writing, and activism, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe transforms the intensely personal into a broader meditation about contemporary society and politics. Raised on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, her 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 as a student and training in New York 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.