Blurring the Lines
Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph, offers a comprehensive survey of a pioneering body of work. Born in Detroit but based in New York since the early 1970s, Ming Smith was the first female African-American photographer to have her work acquired by New Yorkâs Museum of Modern Art. She has mastered a blurry, impressionistic style emulating the mixture of spontaneity and detail in the jazz music she often evokes with her images.
Raised in Columbus, Ohio, Ming Smithâs childhood unfolded in a setting very different to the Manhattan and Brooklyn streets that she made her own (this book contains a striking image of Smith as a child, on her first visit to New York in 1959, looking out of a window with innocent fascination). Shortly after settling in the city she became, in 1973, the first woman member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of black photographers, which, as Yxta Maya Murray notes in one of several accompanying essays, âgathered at each other