Lost (and Found) Artist Series: Ming Smith

Artland’s Lost (and Found) Artist Series focuses on artists who were originally omitted from the mainstream art canon or who have been largely overlooked for most of their careers. This week, we explore the stunning photography of Ming Smith, who in 1975, was the first black woman photographer to have a work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ming Smith – Photographing Black Culture

Ming Smith was born in Detroit in the 1950s, and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Though she started out studying medicine at Howard University in Washington, DC, she soon switched to microbiology. Her marriage to jazz musician David Murray meant that she spent a lot of time on the road touring with various jazz performers. She brought her camera along and started taking impromptu photographs of the jazz musicians, as well as different elements of black culture. She was passionate about capturing the love and richness of black culture, but said in a 2019 interview with the Financial Times that “[b]eing a black woman photographer was like being nobody.” At the time, she didn’t think it was even possible to make money from her photography, let alone to receive any recognition through exhibitions of her work. When she moved to New York, she started out with a career as a fashion model, allowing her to meet the expenses arising from her growing interest in photography.

Ming Smith’s Style and Subjects

From early on, Smith’s style could be characterised as fast-shooting with a rigorous developing and post-printing process, producing complicated and elaborate images with an ethereal quality. Her shooting style often results in out-of-focus images, obscuring the finer details of figure and background. Through this deliberate blur, Smith creates a semi-abstract effect, making her works immediately recognisable but also giving them a unique, dream-like quality. This quality is enhanced by Smith’s experimental post-production techniques which include double-exposure, collage, and painting on prints. Smith’s personal visual language of light and shadow lends a timeless nature to fleeting moments in time. In the words of fellow photographer Gordon Parks, Smith’s “wondrous imagery… gives eternal life to things that might well have been forgotten.”

Smith’s subjects range from artistic, literary and musical icons including James Baldwin, James van der Zee, Romare Bearden, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Sun Ra and Grace Jones, to anonymous city-dwellers.

Ming Smith’s First Exhibition

Smith had her first exhibition in 1973 at Cinandre, a hairdressing salon on 57^th Street and Madison Avenue. She recalls the space as very progressive: “You had black and white, straight and gay. It was artistic and there wasn’t any judgment.” More established African American artists like Romare Bearden and Roy DeCarava came to the exhibition opening, and Cinandre also marked the beginning of a friendship between Smith and Grace Jones, who would come to the salon to get her hair done. Smith and Jones would talk about their everyday life struggles trying to make it in the city, trying to make money, trying to survive. Both women had grown up under Jim Crow’s laws, so it was a huge step for them to have come to New York, trying to forge careers as models and artists. In 1975, Smith took a striking photograph of Jones wearing a black-and-white tutu in a dressing room. She captured a look of deep determination mixed with a gentle vulnerability, a look shared between close friends.

Kamoinge

Around the same time as her first exhibition, Smith was invited by Anthony Barboza and Lou Draper to join the Harlem-based photography collective Kamoinge, a collective which included people like Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks. She was the first woman to join the collective, but never worried about her gender in the all-men group. The most important thing was that they were all artists. The core principle of Kamoinge was the importance of black photographers documenting black life, and pushing back against the limited racial views disseminated by white photographers.