Ming Smith

For more than fifty years, Ming Smith has photographed musicians, dancers, family, and friends amid life and performance. Working with slow shutters, deep shadow, and deliberate blur, she is a photographer of movement. A member of the Kamoinge Workshop in the 1970s, her work lives in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, which first acquired her photographs in 1979. Her fellowship at CARA coincides with the publication of Ming Smith: In the Presence of Spirit, the first monograph of her color photographs, released this fall by Dashwood Books and Speciwomen.

About Ming Smith
Ming Smith (born 1947, Detroit, Michigan) has spent five decades making photographs that blur the line between document and dream. In 1972, she joined Kamoinge, the Black photography collective, as its only female practitioner, and in 1979, she became the first Black woman photographer whose work entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, and her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among many other public institutions. Smith currently lives and works in New York City.

Ming Smith, Self-Portrait with Camera, 1988. Courtesy of the artist.