Where the Past Begins.

Whether it’s the time-worn expression on a face filled with wisdom or a shimmering landscape extending into the distance, photographs have the ability to create empathy and mutual understanding and to narrate the human experience. Photographs are artifacts of the past: they are the crystallization of a specific moment and coordinate in time. However, the truth of what is captured emanates forward becoming a palimpsest, imprinted again and again with new layers of meaning formed by the specific time and individual viewing the image.

Over the past five decades, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe has used her lens in service of storytelling, harnessing the power of images to convey meaning and truth. And while her photographs tell definitive stories—those of the conditions and moments when they were taken—they are also intimate revelations reinforcing our underlying humanity, where our own personal truths can be found, refracted through personal experience.

Begin exploring by selecting a collection below.

In the Abstract

In the Abstract are photographs united in their opacity, their obfuscation of a moment.

Landscapes

“All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to light.” –Louis Kahn

People and Places

"A place is only as good as the people in it." —Pittacus Lore

Daufuskie Island

Before the dawn of development, this Gullah-Geechee sea island in South Carolina portrays the people, places and the still life images of Daufuskie Island that reveal the intimacy and connectivity of a community.

South Africa

Taken in the 1970s during Apartheid in South Africa, these photographs show a riven society through the gaze of an outsider.

Trees and Nature

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky...” ―Kahlil Gibran