Throughout her extraordinary life, Ming Smith has blazed a trail, becoming a pioneering figure in front of and behind the camera. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, Smith grew up amid the horrors of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Her high school guidance counselor discouraged her to attend college, advising Smith her future lay as a domestic, scrubbing floors. Undeterred, Smith enrolled in Howard University and received a BS in microbiology before moving to New York City in 1973.
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To pay the rent, Smith took up modeling and worked alongside Grace Jones, B. Smith, and Toukie Smith as part of the first generation of Black models in beauty and fashion. But the limelight held no particular charm for Smith. Possessed with acute sensitivity to joy and pain, she found solace in being alone, camera in hand, guided by a desire to bearing witness to the spirit made flesh. Whether on the streets of Harlem or Dakar, making portraits of photographer Gordon Parks, writer James Baldwin, and musician Sun Ra, or photographing a field of sunflowers in West Germany, Smith used the camera to preserve the fleeting and fragile beauty of the world.
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“When I’m shooting, I usually have a sense: ‘This is the photograph that I’m going to print. This is the moment,’” Smith says in the new book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out…The image could be lost in a split second. I go with my intuition.”
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