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76 MING SMITH: THE INVISIBLE MAN, SOMEWHERE, EVERYWHERE Oluremi C. Onabanjo MOMA 978-05000-2217-7 £ 13.99 Ming Smith: The Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere is the latest in MOMA’s One on One series that examines a particular work in the museum’ collection in detail. This book, although it does deal with the titular photograph at length, serves as a solid primer on the rich variousness of Ming Smith’s life, work and passions, and contains a generous smattering or reproductions of other of her photographs. Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator of Photography at MOMA gives an account of Smith’s life and career to date that is a model of elegant concision. She places Smith in her political and social context in some detail. Onabanjo has a clear gift for ekphrasis and for cogently explaining the technical aspects of Smith’s practise that doesn’t bore or scare the interested layman away, taking Smith with the utmost seriousness as an accomplished, original and questing artist above all. There’s no doubt that Smith’s been unjustly neglected for her race and gender; Ming herself has said that at the beginning of her career envious males actively tried to sabotage it. She was the first black female photographer to sell her work to MOMA (1979), and she was included in the museum’s Pictures by Women; A History of Modern Photography in 2010. She has exhibited widely and her work is held in several major collections, but it is only recently that she is becoming recognised for the major figure that she is, benefitting from the belated, major shift in the recognition of black art that has occurred in America over the past couple of years. Ming Smith was born in Detroit, raised in Ohio and moved to New York as a young woman. She supported herself early in her career modelling in New York, striking up a friendship with fellow-model Grace Jones who she captured dramatically in her 1978 photo Grace Jones at Studio 54. She was the only woman in the Harlembased Kamoinge photography collective and much of her work from that period is (Harlem) street photography. Rather than urban grit, Smith’s street photography from this period focuses on family, motherhood, community, solidarity, friendship and tenderness. Her camera eye is anything but cruel. There’s a rare emotional warmth in her work, and the way she has ornamented her beautiful photos of children in several African countries in the 70s seems like an act of love or maternal warmth. Smith has an abiding passion for jazz (she was married to the jazz musician David Murray) and photographed some of the leading jazz figures of the time such Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, most of whom were friends. More remarkable is her series of inventive self-portraits, such as the extraordinary Self-Portrait as Josephine of 1986, and her work runs to architecture and nature, such as her remarkable study of sunflowers, Gophing with Shadow and Light of 1987. Brassaï, whom she photographed, is one of her heroes, and although she can be regarded as an important street photographer, her compositions are not the result of lucky accidents. Smith’s is largely a poetry of the blur and she is the mistress of the slow shutter speed, and other opaquing techniques such as deliberately shooting out-of-focus, using double-exposures, or shooting through Spread from Invisible Man.
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books 77 Spread from Invisible Man. shadow or fog, giving some of her photos as spectral there-not-thereness that has an ethical dimension, as well as a poetic, semiotic indeterminacy. Smith hasn’t just painted with light, but with paint too, adding abstract, gestural applications of paint to her photos, as well as with hand-tinting and collage. Often, Smith’s applications of paint, like her blurring effects, serve to give a kinetic quality to her work, a great example of this being her 2022 photograph/painting, Freedom. Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere is one the Invisible Man series of photos (titled after Ralph Ellison’s 1953 novel of the same name) taken between 1988-91 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh and her old stomping ground of Harlem in New York, all of black figures whose faces are turned away from the viewer or obscured by shadows, as an index of social invisibility. Dissolution, grain, blur, dissolving, night, light and shadow all take on symbolic, philosophical overtones, as well as producing photos of a mysterious beauty that at times tends to abstraction. In this photo the scene is bisected by the dark side of a building in whose shadow the features of a stooped and shambling figure walking towards the camera are lost. The snowy path on the right side of the street is spectrally lit by distant street lights; this and the urban scrub on the left point to abandonment. Onabanjo writes that the Invisible Man series was an attempt at ‘rendering a psychological state’, and ‘the social position of complete invisibility... a visual manifestation of structural oppression’. The urban scrub of the empty lot the protagonist is walking past, and the fact that the street lights don’t go up this far, indicate that this is a working class male, possibly walking home from a brutal night-shift. The ramifications of the photograph are beyond race: the work has an oneiric, timeless quality that transcends the chronicling of a particular social and political moment (that of the late 1980s obviously being longgone) – a human, humanity itself, as a brief blur of light flittering over the surface of the world. Especially over the past couple of years there has been a misprision of Smith’s work, with some writers reducing each photo to racial politics, usually with a lazy, mention of ‘Trump’ or ‘George Floyd’ that seems merely tacked-on and obligatory, if not socially fearful and conformist. Alongside the critique and protest there is in Ming Smith’s oeuvre something spiritual and celebratory, almost worshipful of light, the light outside and the light inside. The modest price of the book and the exemplary quality of its commentary make this a perfect introduction of the work of this ground-breaking photographer-artist, though there is on the market a much more comprehensive Aperture monograph, at more than three times the price. There is a retrospective of Ming Smith’s work at MOMA running from February 4 to May 29, 2023. — Chris Milton

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MING SMITH: THE INVISIBLE MAN, SOMEWHERE, EVERYWHERE Oluremi C. Onabanjo

MOMA 978-05000-2217-7 £ 13.99

Ming Smith: The Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere is the latest in MOMA’s One on One series that examines a particular work in the museum’ collection in detail. This book, although it does deal with the titular photograph at length, serves as a solid primer on the rich variousness of Ming Smith’s life, work and passions, and contains a generous smattering or reproductions of other of her photographs. Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator of Photography at MOMA gives an account of Smith’s life and career to date that is a model of elegant concision. She places Smith in her political and social context in some detail. Onabanjo has a clear gift for ekphrasis and for cogently explaining the technical aspects of Smith’s practise that doesn’t bore or scare the interested layman away, taking Smith with the utmost seriousness as an accomplished, original and questing artist above all. There’s no doubt that Smith’s been unjustly neglected for her race and gender; Ming herself has said that at the beginning of her career envious males actively tried to sabotage it. She was the first black female photographer to sell her work to MOMA (1979), and she was included in the museum’s Pictures by Women; A History of Modern Photography in 2010. She has exhibited widely and her work is held in several major collections,

but it is only recently that she is becoming recognised for the major figure that she is, benefitting from the belated, major shift in the recognition of black art that has occurred in America over the past couple of years. Ming Smith was born in Detroit, raised in Ohio and moved to New York as a young woman. She supported herself early in her career modelling in New York, striking up a friendship with fellow-model Grace Jones who she captured dramatically in her 1978 photo Grace Jones at Studio 54. She was the only woman in the Harlembased Kamoinge photography collective and much of her work from that period is (Harlem) street photography. Rather than urban grit, Smith’s street photography from this period focuses on family, motherhood, community, solidarity, friendship and tenderness. Her camera eye is anything but cruel. There’s a rare emotional warmth in her work, and the way she has ornamented her beautiful photos of children in several African countries in the 70s seems like an act of love or maternal warmth. Smith has an abiding passion for jazz (she was married to the jazz musician David Murray) and photographed some of the leading jazz figures of the time such Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, most of whom were friends. More remarkable is her series of inventive self-portraits, such as the extraordinary Self-Portrait as Josephine of 1986, and her work runs to architecture and nature, such as her remarkable study of sunflowers, Gophing with Shadow and Light of 1987. Brassaï, whom she photographed, is one of her heroes, and although she can be regarded as an important street photographer, her compositions are not the result of lucky accidents. Smith’s is largely a poetry of the blur and she is the mistress of the slow shutter speed, and other opaquing techniques such as deliberately shooting out-of-focus, using double-exposures, or shooting through

Spread from Invisible Man.

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