Cultured Magazine

In 1975, Ming Smith very nearly turned down the Museum of Modern Art. The Ohio-raised artist and recent Howard University graduate had been living in New York City for only two years, modeling for beauty advertising to pay the bills. When she dropped off her photography portfolio for review, a receptionist assumed she was a messenger, but when she returned to pick it up she was ushered immediately into the curators' offices. John Szarkowski, the museum's director of photography who spent his tenure there elevating photography to an art form and making the careers of such figures as Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, wasn't in, but as curator Susan Kismaric explained, the museum was keenly interested in acquiring some of Smith's works. A price was named; Smith, who was used to putting her modeling earnings toward darkroom supplies, was taken aback. "That wouldn't even pay for my expenses!" she recently told me of the figure. It is incredible now to think of any young artist telling MoMA no thanks, but Smith, whose extraordinary and humanist depictions, especially of African American people are experiencing a quiet but welcome resurgence of attention, certainly did. Kismaric urged her to reconsider. Think about it over the weekend, she said. Smith did reconsider, and that year became the first African American female photographer to have prints acquired by the museum's permanent collection. Today MoMA owns seven of her black-and-white works, including clear-eyed, graceful documentary photographs of mothers and children in Harlem. Also within the museum's holdings are flashes of the hand-colored and dreamlike multiple-exposure prints and electrifying blur Gordon Parks referred to when he wrote of her pictures years later in an essay for her 1991 monograph "A Ming Breakfast: Grits and Scrambled Moments": "Wondrous stuff crops up in her imagery, stuffing itself into her sight." "I always believed my work was bigger than me," Smith tells me. "And the MoMA was a milestone. But then for 40 years there was nothing, no shows, no artist talks." When she says this, she's exaggerating, though not by much. The current revival of interest in her photographs was largely helped along by MoMA's "Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography," a 2010 exhibition which recontextualized Smith's work alongside that of fellow experimenters in the form, including Diane Arbus, an influence, and her friend Lisette Model. Writing in the New York Times of a solo show that same year at June Kelly Gallery, Holland Cotter praised Smith's "heartfelt and gorgeous" pictures: "It's hard to think of another photographer who could set a misty head shot of the writer James Baldwin in a bank of dark clouds over the Harlem skyline and get away with it." Last year, Steven Kasher Gallery hosted the first 198 culturedmag.com THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS BY REBECCA BENGAL PORTRAIT BY KATSU NAITO

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