Culture

Ming Smith’s Pioneering Excavations of Black Femininity


Smith photographed many famous Black cultural figures in the course of her career, and her images of Black women communicate the resilience and vigor necessary to flourish in the face of society’s exclusions. In “Grace Jones, Studio 54” (1970s), the performer doesn’t so much pose as unfurl herself before the camera, wafting a gilded scarf over her head and shoulders, wearing bewitching black-tinted glasses and staring into the middle distance, lips apart. Glamour, here, is a weapon and a power source that Jones embodies with her seemingly unvanquishable gift for movement. In an interview last year with the Financial Times, Smith said that she and Jones, a friend, would commiserate about “trying to make money, trying to survive.” She added, “We came out of Jim Crow. And so just coming to New York and trying to be a model or to be anything was new.” “Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do with It” (1984) was captured at the second apex of the singer’s fame, but this is not the show-woman of MTV. Standing on a dock beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, Turner looks off to one side, her lips pursed and her eyes shaded as if she’s conjuring up a difficult memory. Smith must have waited to get the shot, knowing not to chatter or ask too many questions but to let silence descend on the scene so that Turner would begin to turn inward.

In 1975, Smith became the first African-American female photographer to have her works enter MoMA’s permanent collection. Then, as she said in one recent interview, “for forty years, there was nothing, no shows, no artist talks.” But it appears that the modern day has finally caught up to Smith, who is by now about seventy. (She does not disclose her exact age.) In recent years, her work has been included in exhibitions such as “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” and the Brooklyn Museum’s “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.” Smith, who lives in Harlem, has welcomed the recognition—“It’s not just having my photographs in Frieze Masters, it’s people who are supportive of black artists,” she told the Financial Times—but she has waited too long for it. Her remarkable body of photography belongs in the canon for its wealth of ideas and for its preservation of Black women’s lives during an age, not unlike today, when nothing could be taken for granted.

This piece was drawn from an essay in “Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph,” which is out in November from Aperture.



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