Ming Smith

by Ming Smith

Ming Smith was born in Detroit and is based in Harlem. She was the first female member of Kamoinge, a collective of black photographers documenting black life in New York in the ‘60s. She later became the first black woman photographer to be included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

Her work consists mainly of back-and-white street photography that she describes as “capturing the struggle, the survival and to find the grace in it.” Her work has been influenced by music, mainly jazz and blues, and many of her subjects were well-known black cultural figures like Nina Simone, Alice Coltrane and Grace Jones.

Her work has only recently received the recognition it deserves due to several high-profile exhibitions; she was included in ‘Soul of a Nation’ at Tate Modern, as well as featured at the Brooklyn Museum’s ‘We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.’

Her work is also in the collections of the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Source: https://www.mingsmith.net/about.