The Brooklyn Rail

“Hot breath streaming from black tenements, frustrated window panes reflecting the eyes of the sun, breathing musical songs of the living.”
—Louis Draper on the Kamoinge Workshop

In 1963, Roy DeCarava brought together a group of photographers to give shape to what Louis Draper called an “emerging African consciousness exploding within.” In an era of pervasive institutional racism and social exclusion, Louis Draper, Anthony Barboza, Al Fennar, and Herbert Randall were just a few of the first independent Black photographers to compose the Kamoinge Workshop. As a collective study group born of isolation, Kamoinge and its members championed the need to self-determine a true Black visuality through self-organized group exhibitions and supplemental publications, eventually building a gallery in a basement studio in Harlem. Informed by the ethics of the blues, jazz, family values, and Black liberation, Kamoinge gave rise to what the scholar Romi Crawford terms a “serious sociality” in her essay, “Reading Between the Photographs: Serious Sociality in the Kamoinge Photographic Workshop,” a form of pedagogical discourse that eclipsed the limits of university education. As an all-male group by 1972, Kamoinge invited model and dancer Ming Smith to join in, setting the stage for Smith to develop into one of the first, most prolific Black women photographers of our times.

Born in Detroit and raised in Columbus, Ohio during the Jim Crow era, Smith received a multi-institutional homecoming consisting of three exhibits at the Columbus Museum of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Gund at Kenyon College. Born to a father who was a pharmacist and a well-heeled mother removed from the workforce, Smith credits herself for developing her talent in photography in conversation with Dr. Mark Sealy at the Wexner Center, recounting that on her first day of kindergarten, she took ownership of her mother’s Kodak brownie. Her keen sense of color, however, came from her grandfather; her proclivity for poetry from her Creole grandmother. Going on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in microbiology at Howard University, Smith soon realized her dreams had outgrown her hometown, so she moved to New York City to “earn better” as a model and dancer. Speaking via Zoom, Smith recalled, “At an audition at Barboza’s studio, I overheard two men debating if photography was an art form or not and I was captivated.” Shortly after arriving in Manhattan, Smith began to share her work in open critiques, moving between her lives in the West Village, the fashion industry, and early dance studios she came to be part of. Upon entering the fold of Kamoinge, she began to document life in Harlem, coming into contact with vanguards like W. Eugene Smith, James Van Der Zee, Sun Ra, and her then-husband, jazz musician David Murray, with whom she would go on to explore the deep tones of vibrato through a dedicated practice of photographing everyday Black life.

Wind Chime at the Wexner Center features nearly thirty black-and-white images from Smith’s “Africa” series. Tapping into a sensuous receptivity for rhythmic energies on the streets of Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt, Smith’s Dakar Roadside with Figures, Dakar, Senegal, and Prelude to Middle Passage (Île de Gorée, Senegal) (both 1972) exemplify how the artist collapses inner and outer worlds, activating the silhouette of the body as a context for the landscape. In the artist’s seminal monograph published by Aperture, Greg Tate describes Smith’s virtuosic blurring of background and foreground with painterly consciousness as a “visual trill,” as Smith’s masterful use of double exposure and low shutter speed captures and compresses depths of field, seen in Womb (Cairo, Egypt) and Masque (Cairo, Egypt) (both 1992). Debilitating the camera as a eugenic tool, Smith creates semi-transparent kinfolk that spin and turn before specters of architecture, in this case, the Sphinx. A beaded neckpiece overlays a portrait of a mother and child; time and space enfold, giving rise to a shared psychic life between the artist and her subjects.

In the first-floor galleries, curator Kelly Kivland builds space for Smith’s longstanding interest in layering movement, spirituality, and a feminine way of knowing in the atmospheric installation Shango Future (2024). Entering the gallery, a salon-style presentation of works from 1972 to 2024 moves us through Smith’s dreamlike receptivity to the transience of life and death, presenting fragments of past and future sacredness, returning us to the breath of the present. In Oshun Prayer (New York, NY) (1973), tide-drawn tracings in the sand meet a worn strip of rock, splitting the frame into matter and immaterial temporality. In Watching for Katherine Dunham (ca. 1988), and Alberta Wright (ca. 1993), the anticipation of the encounter with Black genius moves Smith to capture the strange luminosity of darkness in relation to incandescent light. Arthur Jafa picks up on Smith’s anti-cinematic lighting of her figures. In conversation with Greg Tate in the artist’s monograph, Jafa points out, “You see her doing something akin to what DeCarava does, with flattened midtones. Everything is in high key. She erases/destroys the background-foreground relationship.” Heightening form by highlighting backgrounds, Smith’s people seemingly reflect their environs, and vice versa, drawing an affective filiality with spaces they inhabit. Echoing the contradiction of lighting for background rather than foreground, essayist Namwali Serpell attributes Smith’s atmospheric portraiture to her time in jazz circles, “This isn’t black and white, but dark and shine; … The result is less of a glissando across absence and presence and more of a rhythm—a syncopated scatting of them.” Smith gets down in the darkness, building atmospheric resonances between herself, her subjects, and her bodies of work that exhibition curator Kivland describes to the author via email as “A kind of resilience in practice, an intimacy that transcends time.”

Spectral illuminations and the sounds of breezes move viewers into Shango Future. Outlining the gentle rise and fall of substance and shadow, Smith improvises with her son, jazz musician, Mingus Murray, supported by Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Design, to breathe a vital aliveness and gentle swing into the once-collapsed depths of Shango Future. Smith, describing her first multimedia installation in conversation with this reviewer via Zoom, says, “When you hear wind chimes, it’s a reminder of spirit. You can’t see air, but it's manifest in two bodies of glass meeting each other. It is a minor sound, not overbearing like an orchestra.” Nearby in Birds (2022), a boy in blue looks out at seagulls encircling the wind that carries them.

Three painted prints—Female Nude, Divine Feminine and Bearden and Female Nude, Mother Nature (both 1990), and “Transcendence, Turiya and Ramakrisha,” for Alice Coltrane (2006)—bear the painterly vividness of the artist’s hand. Contemplating an act of reverence or prayer to the feminine divine that connects all, Smith builds metaphors through rhythmic color patterning, building solidarity with her subject by keeping the eye distracted from historically imposed fictions of poverty seen in Black nude portraiture. In Female Nude, Divine Feminine and Bearden, a reclined figure gazes over her shoulder, turning away from the camera, as delicate yellow brushstrokes emit sparks from her crown. Above her hip, a torn collage of blue and black abstract paint hovers above palm leaf wallpaper. Gray tonalities skirt the edge of black voluptuousness, as Smith’s photographs pool black ink into their edges. In Female Nude, Mother Nature, ripped and torn tinted photographs of tropical foliage encroach a Black female figure in repose. With her eyes closed to the cacophony of the outside world in collage, she arouses an elemental softness. Two reveling bodies sway their fists in the air, imaged beside her; if there ever were an image of “rest as revolution,” this would be it. “I think I’ve always been a closet painter.” Smith smiles over Zoom, “My grandfather used to love pointing out the trims of a freshly painted home after he was done with it.” Smith’s vibrant paintings over black-and-white photographs are acts of consecration and vandalism all at once, as the artist recalls growing up at a time when “you either took good black-and-white photographs, or you were a whore. Color was strictly commercial.” Being aware of biases against color in traditional critique circles, she carries a thrift mentality from her forefathers, refusing to dispose of a print even if it wasn’t working for her. “Sometimes I’d add color where the print isn’t working,” she admits unabashedly. Compelled to smear pigment directly onto photographic surfaces, she’d accentuate the illusion of motion in composition, mentally moving outside of the real and into the phantasmagoric.

Christopher Pinney describes the concept of darshan in the context of Indian image-making. While moving past the indexical status of the photograph through transference, believers would literally “establish the breath” by consecrating an image with milk, paint, pigment, or honey, building a tactile relationship between the bearer of the image and the image itself. Empowering of the image through devotion, Smith uses complex handling of media repeatedly to fill elements and backgrounds with gestural markings and brushstrokes. Seen most evidently in “Transcendence, Turiya and Ramakrisha,” Smith’s wild markings in spirited forest greens, black, and white paints build a chaotic, whirling environment for the innermost beauty of a blue-skinned Black female body, partially exposed at the lower-edge of the frame. Photographic lens flares and white paints coalesce, enveloping her shoulders as red dots hover in upper corners, stopping shy of the body’s auratic field. Articulating a spiritual breath and state of oneness between woman and nature, Smith places the illumined body in a protective forcefield, looking away from representations of the real world to defer any ill-meaning gaze directed toward Indigenous Black femmes.

While walking through the exhibition with this reviewer, Kivland points to the vibratory substance in Smith’s intuitive imagery, stating, “She has an intuitive ability to capture the fleeting and timeless. Her unyielding commitment to remaining authentic reminds me of the power and strength of staying vulnerable.” Waking the viewer to perceptual biases and often awakening the surface of her photographs through filmic technique and painting, Smith’s magic lies in the release of energy produced in her masterful techniques and processes, ultimately locating the freedom of Black consciousness and the autonomy of Black temporality beyond the hegemonies of white American identity and power.