Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

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.

Ming Smith was born in Detroit and raised in Columbus, Ohio. A self-taught artist and former model, in the 1970s, she published her early work in The Black Photographers Annual. Smith's work has been collected by and presented in major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Brooklyn Museum; National Museum of African American History and Culture, and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Serpentine Galleries, and Tate Modern, London. Beginning in 2017, her work was included in the celebrated traveling exhibitions We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 - 85 and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, as well as in Arthur Jafa's exhibition A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, which traveled from London to Berlin, Prague, Stockholm, and Porto, Portugal. In 2019, Smith's solo exhibition with Jenkins Johnson Gallery was awarded the Frieze Stand Prize at Frieze New York. Smith lives and works in New York.

Emmanuel Iduma is a writer based in Lagos, Nigeria, and New York. A contributor to publications, including Aperture, the New York Review of Books, BOMB, and British Journal of Photography, he is the author of The Sound of Things to Come (2016) and A Stranger's Pose (2018). He was associate curator for the inaugural Nigerian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Janet Hill Talbert is a jewelry designer and former book editor living in New York. A publishing industry veteran who spent more than two decades as an editor, Talbert served as vice president at Doubleday and founded the African American book imprint Harlem Moon.

M. Neelika Jayawardane is associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Oswego, and research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg. Her work has appeared in Aperture, Frieze, and Al Jazeera English, among other publications, and she is a founding member of Africa Is a Country.

Namwali Serpell is author of the novel The Old Drift (2019) and has written for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, n+1, and the Guardian, among other publications. She is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.