A Shine and a Song

Every Saturday, Ming Smith ascends: She spins, steps, and leaps to the rhythm of West African drums. As she makes her way from Harlem to Peridance Center in Union Square—not far from the West Village where she first found her footing as a photographer in the ‘70s—she pauses to observe what has changed and what remains. “Harlem had a lot of dilapidated buildings and excavated lands then,” she recalls, “Hoboken, too.”

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In Setting out to Sea (Hoboken, NJ), 1972, four young boys stand atop makeshift rafts, paddling down a pond of water in Hoboken. “In their minds they're out to sea,” muses Smith, from her long-time apartment that faces New York’s East River. As she looks back on the image from her past, the Detroit-born artist recalls her own childhood in Columbus, Ohio, where she would look at the world around her with wonder, making tents out of blankets and pies out of mud and admiring the afternoon sunlight bouncing off leaves. Seeing was her natural talent.

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It’s not just the artist’s own memories that coalesce in these early works, now on view in her current solo exhibition “On the Road” at Nicola Vassell Gallery, but also the memories of others. “Anyone who sees them, they start talking about their own lives,” Smith says. These stories become Smith’s, too, metabolized into her images: healing, regenerative, emblems of life.

Smith’s life from 1970 to 1993 shimmers throughout many never-before-seen photographs in the new exhibition. There are images from her first shoots in New York some 50 years ago as well as scenes from her time traveling abroad. “I have thousands of photographs here,” says the artist who became the first Black woman to have her photography acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and has photographed luminaries such as Gordon Parks, Sun Ra, Grace Jones, Tina Turner, James Baldwin, James Brown, Nina Simone, Alvin Ailey—the list goes on.

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“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed,” Zora Neale Hurston writes in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. “So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.” Smith’s work captures this shine and song, the desire for human connection. Tender candid moments and jolts of light render her images alive. Double exposure, slow shutter speeds, strokes of paint, and collaged images all enter into a rhythmic choreography under her nimble hands.

As the story goes, Smith took her first photo in kindergarten when she captured her classmates using a camera passed down from her mother. Her father was a pharmacist who practiced photography whenever he could. In college at Howard University, she documented her day-to-day life (and even photographed a young Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay). But it wasn’t until she arrived in New York City that she began to see photography as an art form and herself as an artist. 

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There she landed an agent and found herself in the fashion milieu with Grace Jones as a friend and muse, studied dance, immersed herself in the Black Arts Movement, and was given a fateful list of photographers for test shots. One of whom happened to be Anthony Barboza, a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a pioneering photography collective that advocated for representing and empowering Black culture in the face of the blatant and cruel systemic racism in America. “I was quiet, and I just listened. And after a point I had what I needed, and I just needed to shoot.” She set out to immerse herself in visuals, visited the Strand bookstore and pored over images by Brassaï. At night, she watched old black-and-white films at Little Carnegie Theater.

Later, Smith would go on tour around the world with her then-partner the prolific jazz composer and saxophonist David Murray. During those years on tour, Smith took photos inside, on stage, backstage, and then outside. When the white, male photographers pushed past her to get to the front, she stood unwavering in her difference. "It gave me an obstacle, so I had more of a unique way of photographing. I really didn't want the standard, perfect shot," she reflects.

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Often, she would duck out of the venue mid-show to photograph the surrounding area. "How many times can you hear them play that same song?” she asks, jokingly. The mornings also offered ample time to explore while the band was still asleep from a late night. In Europe, she would seek out the dance school of Katherine Dunham, a revolutionary dancer and choreographer, and Smith's North Star. “They didn't have hip-hop; they didn't have jazz. I would look for anything that was Black, and Dunham was the only thing they had then,” she says. 

Eventually she gave birth to Mingus Murray, who would accompany the family on the road. Today, her musician son is her creative partner. “He basically curated this show,” she proudly reveals. He’s also the reason his mother is back in New York after a 15-year stint in California. New York in the mid-’80s was more somber; Smith lost her artist friends to AIDs and then her parents in the ‘90s. Settled in Montclair, New Jersey, she left her then-husband and head west to Los Angeles where she landed in Laurel Canyon. “My work in California was mainly birds and trees and clouds because that's what I was around,” she reminisces. “I still miss it sometimes.” 

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What’s next for the artist? “I would like to do one really beautiful film,” she suggests wistfully but with intention—maybe a tale of Black folklore or an ode to the culture of New York City. It will dance with light and poetry, the way she sees the world. As Smith reflects on her recent ascension to art world fame, she is humble and grateful. “I had a calling, and I followed it. I recommend everyone to do that in their life,” she offers. “Sometimes it doesn't make sense, but in the end everything will work itself out.” Cognizant of her rare working relationship with her son, Smith thinks of on her own parents, who passed away a few years before her big break. “They did not understand what I was doing in life, but such is life,” she says. “Maybe they are the ones who are making it all happen now.”

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“Ming Smith: On the Road” is on view through June 15 at Nicola Vassell at 138 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011.