Moutoussamy-Ashe, Jeanne
1951-present · Contribution: 1975-present
Spent five years (1977-1982) documenting the Gullah Geechee community of South Carolina’s Daufuskie Island before development transformed it, publishing the results as Daufuskie Island (1982) with a foreword by Alex Haley, and authored Viewfinders (1986), the first book-length history of Black women photographers in America
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
A Cooper Union-trained photographer who began her career as an NBC graphic artist and photojournalist, Moutoussamy-Ashe was encouraged by family friend Gordon Parks, also profiled in this collection, to seek press credentials for the 1968 United Negro College Fund tennis tournament organized by Arthur Ashe, whom she later married in 1977. Starting that year she began photographing the Gullah Geechee people of Daufuskie Island — descendants of formerly enslaved people who had maintained a distinct Creole culture and language in relative isolation — producing an intimate visual record before a new bridge and resort development permanently altered the island; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired a series of these images in 2014. Her 1986 book Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers, researched alongside historian Deborah Willis, documented more than one hundred previously overlooked Black women photographers dating to 1839, and after her husband’s 1993 death from AIDS-related illness, she chronicled their family’s experience in Daddy and Me and has since led the Arthur Ashe Endowment for the Defeat of AIDS, work recognized with a presidential appointment as an alternate U.S. representative to the 50th United Nations General Assembly.
Life & background
Born July 9, 1951, in Chicago to architect John Warren Moutoussamy and interior designer Elizabeth Rose Hunt Moutoussamy, Moutoussamy-Ashe studied at the Art Institute of Chicago as a child before earning a B.F.A. in photography from Cooper Union in 1975, including a junior-year independent study in West Africa. She has photographed for Life, Sports Illustrated, Essence, and other major publications since the mid-1970s, published five books, and continues to exhibit and lead AIDS-related philanthropic work from South Kent, Connecticut, including a major 2024-2025 Whitney Museum retrospective of her Daufuskie Island photographs.
Sources
- Whitney Museum of American Art; The HistoryMakers; AWARE Women Artists
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