Ming Smith

This is a long-awaited monograph on photographer Ming Smith, whose poetic and experimental images have become icons of twentieth-century African American life.

In the early 1970s, when African American photographers were keenly aware of their isolation in a field dominated by white men, two collectives held a joint meeting. The result was the formation of a more robust group, Kamoinge—which in Kenya’s Kikuyu language means a group of people acting together. In swift succession, Ming Smith became the only woman in the new collective of Harlem artists, and the first African American woman to have photographs acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her poetic images—influenced by jazz, the deep tonalities of Roy DeCarava, and the dynamism of street photography—seek, as she says, “to capture Black culture, the richness, the love.” This monograph, the first devoted to a comprehensive look at three decades of Smith’s life and work, promises to be a major contribution to the history of twentieth-century American photography.