“Ming Smith
Photographs:1978 – 2010,” a captivating exhibition that spans three decades
of documenting diverse people and cultures throughout the world, will open
at the June Kelly Gallery on June 18. The works will remain on view
through July 30.
Ming’s
provocative images demonstrate a keen eye and an inexhaustible interest and
empathy for the human condition and the drama of life. Ming has said
that her “affair” with the camera began early on “with images solidly
entrenched in my heart.”
The late
photographer Gordon Parks admired Ming’s work and once wrote, “Wondrous
images keep cropping up, stuffing themselves into her sight. She
grasps them and gives eternal life to things that might well have been
forgotten.”
Ming’s
deceptively simple but evocative imagery hovers between figurative and
abstraction as she documents people and life experiences — from storm clouds
gathering over her hometown in the Midwest to such dramatic urban landscapes
as Manhattan skyscrapers and Harlem sidewalks, awesome stone cathedrals in
Europe and Latin America, Cairo’s crowded streets and bustling marketplaces
in Senegal and Tokyo.
The artist’s
sensibility captures the spirit and energy in transient moments, often
coupling personal narrative with accessibility, as when she pays homage to
the memory of a departed jazz musician in Flowers for Lionel Hampton.
Ming’s
photographs frequently reflect a predilection for haunting austerity with
indelible effect. She heightens the drama with a heavy emphasis on the
dark end of the tonal scale. In the dim light, the image often appears
blurred, transitional, resonating with mystery.
Ming’s
innovative pairing of camera and paintbrush puts further emphasis on her
expressive, painterly way of shooting quickly, developing distortions
purposefully and later giving the photograph a thin swath of paint to
achieve an even more ephemeral effect, as in Convent Avenue – Harlem.
A native of
Detroit, Michigan, Ming lives and works in New York City. She holds a
B.S. degree from Howard University and has been the recipient of grants from
the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts.
She is a member of the Kamoinge Workshop in Harlem, the crucial support and
networking group of African-American photographers founded in the 1960's.
Ming’s work is
represented in a number of public, corporate and private collections,
including The Museum of Modern Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture in New York, the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum & Center for
African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, and the AT&T
Corporation.
