Ming Smith

2023 Honoree / Achievement in Portraiture

Ming Smith has been photographing since early childhood. Embracing photography as a spiritual practice, the Harlem-based, Detroit-born artist’s photographs reflect a lifelong exploration of movement, light, rhythm, and shadow.

Moving to Harlem after graduating from Howard University in the early 1970s, Smith found the neighborhood to be home to a community of Black artists, musicians, and performers, including herself. A woman of many firsts, she was the first woman to join the Kamoinge Workshop, a Harlem-based collective of Black photographers documenting Black life, and, in 1979, became the first Black woman photographer acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. Known for her poetic black-and-white street photography and portraits of notable Black cultural figures, Smith’s detailed approach to image making has employed a range of in-camera, darkroom, and post-production techniques, which include, but are not limited to slowing down shutter speeds, multiple exposure prints, collage, and hand-painting on prints. The result is an oeuvre of equally stunning and evocative images of Black life that prioritize complexity, technicality, and beauty.

Smith is in love with light—what catches our eye and what lifts our spirits. What she leaves in the shadows, she leaves for the viewer to dig deep and question. She calls upon the viewer to fall in love as well; we cling to what she spotlights and we crave to know more of what she obscures. It is this thoughtful balance that keeps the eye coming back for more, both caught by brightness and lost in the depth. Her work is musical, bouncing through melody and harmony that reflect her long-held connection to the electric intuition and improvisation behind jazz.

With Ming Smith, the mundane becomes magic. She finds beauty in everyday life and in the mystery of lives we’ll never know beyond a passing glance. There is an undeniable aura behind each image—each moment is a caught breath, rapt with suspended movement. Her experimental techniques also shine when traveling from photograph to photograph. Rough edges, blurred lines, intuitive strokes of
paint, and double exposures all contribute to a fantasy of reality that Smith dreams to life.

Her images are intimate, whether they are catching someone’s striking stare into the camera, following the soft lines of skin and fabric, or twinkling with the speckled light of nature through the trees. She looks for something deeper than what we can take in at first glance; she looks for family, for perseverance, for joy, for life. It is a special thing to dive into the world of Ming Smith, and she invites you to do so with open arms.

As an artist, full recognition for Smith’s work arrived in response to several high-profile exhibitions. She was included in MoMA’s 2010 seminal exhibition, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography. Additional major group exhibitions include We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 at Brooklyn Museum (New York) in 2017; Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern in London, England (2017), which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas (2018), The Broad in Los Angeles, California (2019), Brooklyn Museum in New York (2019), deYoung Museum in San Francisco, California (2019), and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2020); and Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond) and presented by Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York) (2020). More recently, Smith’s work was presented in the solo exhibition, Projects: Ming Smith (2023), at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Currently on view, Ming Smith: Feeling the Future (2023) at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston;Smith’s first solo exhibition at a major institution to survey her work from the early 1970s through the present. Her work is included in the collections of MoMA (New York, New York), the Whitney Museum of Art (New York, New York), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Pennsylvania), Detroit Institute of Arts (Michigan), Virginia Museum of Fine Art (Richmond), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York, New York), and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture (Washington, DC). In 2023, Smith received the Lifetime Achievement award from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

Website: mingsmithstudio.com

Photo: Self Portrait