‘New York was a big, bad city’: the hazy, radical photography of Ming Smith
Ever since she arrived in New York from Detroit in the early 1970s, Ming Smith says, she’s led an aesthetically rich, if not always financially secure, life. “There was no way to support yourself as an artist back then,” recalls the photographer. “I did it for the love, for the legacy; it was what my life stood for.”
This month, visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York will be able to see a little of that legacy. The new exhibition, Projects: Ming Smith, goes deep into Smith’s archive to draw together images of seminal jazz musicians, such as Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, alongside quasi-documentary images of important sites of Black culture, such as New York’s African Burial Ground, as well as more fluid, impressionistic works, including her August Wilson series, a tribute to the playwright. All these images blur, both figuratively and literally (Smith favours hazy, long exposures), into a body of work in which it’s hard to distinguish the artist behind the camera from the surrounding culture.
For the exhibition, staged in conjunction with the Studio Museum in Harlem, Smith worked with Thelma Golden, its director and chief curator, and Oluremi “Remi” C Onabanjo, from MoMA’s photography department, to select the pictures, many of which are going on display publicly for the first time.
Smith recalls feeling vulnerable as Golden and Onabanjo dug through two separate storage spaces, as well as the photographer’s current studio, to choose works, but she’s very pleased with the selection. “I think the editing was just brilliant,” she says. “You could take one image and it would introduce you to a whole mindset in the African American culture.”
Today, collectors, art-fair patrons and gallery-goers around the world know and admire Smith’s radical, evocative, black-and-white prints; the hiphop producer Swizz Beats and the late fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld are just two of the prominent figures who have publicly praised her work. However, Smith’s route to success was long and varied.
Born in Detroit (her father chose Ming’s first name because of his love of Chinese culture) and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Smith studied at Howard University in Washington DC with the intention of becoming a doctor, before her squeamishness made her change her plans.
“I couldn’t cut the frog,” she recalls of her early dissection classes, “and just the thought of having to cut someone’s head open, and having the confidence to operate on someone’s brain, was awful! I didn’t even like to clean fish.”
Arriving in New York in the early 1970s, she started modelling, earning $100 an hour, more money than her father – a pharmacy graduate of Ohio
State – was making in a week back home. “I didn’t care that New York was a big, bad city,” she remembers.” I knew who I was, and $100 an hour? That was my main focus.”
Smith already had some camera skills, and, in visiting photographers’ studios, she gained greater insight into the form. She joined the Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop in 1972, then at the vanguard of the Black Arts movement (a kind of cultural counterpart to the Black Power movement), and developed a distinctive style and cultural focus. “That was the mindset with Kamoinge, to have our own personal take on Black culture,” she explains. “In Harlem there were painters, there were writers, but the world knew Harlem as a place of drug addicts, and poverty and children in dirty, torn clothes.”
Smith also worked as a dancer, which, combined with her modelling career, provided her access behind the velvet rope . In 1977, Grace Jones, the model turned singer, invited Smith to photograph her performance at Studio 54. The pair had first met at a notable hair salon, Cinandre, and hit it off.
“I went to get my hair done. She was a model, I was a model,” says Smith. “She was telling me her woes. We were women expressing our fears, doubts and our discontent about being a Black model.”
In 1978, a friend who was considering dancing for the jazz musician Sun Ra accompanied Smith to one of his concerts, where the photographer shot the band leader. “I got a call from this dancer friend. She was doing some kind of Egyptian dancing, and she invited me to the concert, so I took my camera,” she recalls. “That’s one of my most iconic photographs.”
And in 1984, an invitation to appear in Tina Turner’s video for What’s Love Got to Do With It? led to Smith photographing Turner at the peak of her career.
Despite these encounters, Smith earned little from her photography for much of her working life. That changed about six years ago. In 2017, many museum visitors in the UK and the US enjoyed her work as part of the internationally acclaimed travelling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power; following this show, Smith’s photographs were the subject of many commercial gallery solo exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic, and she received plaudits in London and New York from the Frieze Art Fair. Later this month, a series of rare and never-before-seen works by Smith can be seen at Frieze Los Angeles in The Things She Knows. Next month, New York’s International Center for Photography will add to these accolades, when it bestows its annual lifetime achievement award on the photographer.
Though she is pleased to have received such praise, Smith says the work itself has always been her true reward. “It wasn’t necessarily having an exhibition or selling print, it’s the doing of it, that’s where the beauty of it, the joy comes from,” she says. “You can have some power; it’s not about beautiful clothes or the biggest house. It’s a lifestyle, it’s a mindset, it’s something about spirit.”
With this exhibition, she hopes to pass some of that spirit on to MoMA’s visitors. “The love of Black culture, that’s what’s important to me. Someone could see an image of [the acclaimed dance troupe] the Dunham Dancers, and it could open up a whole world; they could see a picture of [the jazz musicians] Randy Weston or Pharoah Sanders, and that could inspire them; they could see an image of the African burial grounds or August Wilson, and that could inspire them. It would be this wonderful, beautiful world that would open up to them.”
Projects: Ming Smith is on view in the the Museum of Modern Art’s streetlevel galleries until 29 May. Nicola Vassell Gallery presents Ming Smith: The Things She Knowsat Frieze Los Angeles from 16-19 February
trouble” on 19 January. In a pre-recorded video released by her friends after her arrest, she appealed for help: “Don’t let us disappear quietly from this world!”
Like many vigils over the weekend of 26-27 November, the assembly that Cao and her friends took part in quickly turned into a protest. In the most widespread anti-government protests since 1989, demonstrators decried the lockdowns, mass surveillance and compulsory testing of China’s zeroCovid policy. Many protesters held up blank sheets of A4 paper and some even called on president Xi Jinping to step down.
The China protest database of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute recorded 68 protests across 31 cities in China between 26 November and 4 December.
In the days that followed, with the aid of surveillance camera footage and facial recognition technology, police detained numerous protesters, say individuals who have been interrogated by Chinese police.
US-based rights group Chinese Human Rights Defenders has gathered the names of more than 30 people who were taken into custody and estimates that at least 100 people have been summoned, interrogated or detained – most of them concentrated in Beijing. Some of them have been released on bail, but remain under close police surveillance for one year.
These figures are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Many more arrests remained unreported. A US-based Uyghur man says his 19-year-old sister, Kamile Wayit, a college student in central China, was taken away by police in mid-December when she went back to Xinjiang for winter break. Kewser Wayit says he does not know the reason for his sister’s detention, but police called his father when Kamile posted a video of the protests on social media. An officer at a local police station put the phone down when the Guardian called requesting comment.
The spontaneous “Blank Paper movement” has turned many ordinary young Chinese into accidental activists who have unwittingly rekindled China’s beleaguered rights defence movement, which was almost completely eradicated under Xi’s decade-long, ironfisted crackdown on activists, dissidents, rights lawyers and NGOs.
Human rights experts pointed out that although the “Blank Paper movement” was fundamentally different from the previous Weiquan (rights defence) movement in that protesters had a range of motivations, they carried the same desire for basic rights, so it could be seen as a renewal of China’s rights movement.
‘We all want to fight back’
The decade-long Weiquan movement – which involved a loose network of rights lawyers, NGO workers, journalists and activists who helped ordinary Chinese in the lower social strata to assert their legal rights – started in 2003 but dissolved after a series of crackdown on civil society under Xi’s rule.
Despite government critics being silenced for over a decade, the number of voices demanding freedom last November reveals the ongoing discontent against Xi’s rule.
Two young people who talked to the Guardian separately say events in 2022, from workers’ protests against Covid curbs in south China to the lone protester in Beijing who hung banners calling for free votes and the removal of Xi, resonated deeply.
Another person who participated in the protests says they were elated to find so many like-minded people around them.
“It’s encouraging to know that many people are dissatisfied like me, and that we all want to fight back,” says Anna*, who has been interrogated by police and is still under surveillance. “But it is upsetting to see so many of my friends arrested and we have no way to protect ourselves … we just want to live in a normal world.”
Eva Pils, a law professor at King’s College London, says the Communist party’s leadership was not only suppressing the coronavirus, but also the critics of its policies. “Then it only took a few sparks, such as the reaction to the Urumqi fire and to the lone protester on Sitong Bridge, to set off fairly largescale protests against the suppression of civil and political rights.”
Dr Teng Biao, a veteran rights activist who was at the forefront of the rights defence movement in 2003, says the “Blank Paper” protesters face much higher risks today as the political situation is more repressive.
“The Blank Paper movement shows that even under the dictatorial regime’s hi-tech surveillance, people still managed to stage nationwide protests,” says Teng, now a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. “This will have a profound impact on China’s democratic struggles in the future.”
Teng says protesters’ demands, particularly those calling for Xi’s ousting, would have angered the authorities and harsher crackdowns can be expected. “China cannot tolerate anyone challenging its system and authority.”
The Communist party has since blamed “hostile forces” for mobilising the protests – an indication that harsh punishment would be used against those it sees as key players.
Lu Jun, a former head of anti-discrimination NGO Yirenping who moved to the US after it was closed in Xi’s crackdown, says the protests have likely awakened “a consciousness of rights” among young people but questions the sustainability of the moment.
William Nee, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, says the Communist party’s social control makes it “nearly impossible to organise and mobilise, so the big challenge will be finding ways to make this newfound awareness actionable on the ground”.
A 25-year-old woman who had been interrogated by police after protesting in south China tells the Guardian that even though she is frightened by police, the protests have radicalised her as she has witnessed the power of collective resistance for the first time in her life.
“I eagerly await the next gathering.”