Cultured Magazine

affecting bodies of work, including an early 1990s series made in Pittsburgh, where she photographed people and places of the Hill District where playwright August Wilson set his Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas. Her musician son Mingus, whom she had with Murray, sits at a small desk nearby, poring through his mother's digital archives. The presence of the "wondrous stuff" Parks wrote of is palpable in this room—the record of an artistic and adventurous sensibility that casts uncommon light on artists and ordinary persons alike. The glitter and sequined cape of Sun Ra in Smith's deservedly famous portrait of the avant-jazz musician unfurls winglike over his shoulder, seeming to shed layers of stars in his wake, a cosmic path. Face up on another stack of prints is a portrait of Grace Jones, head ecstatically thrown back, in a wash of glitter that Smith enhanced with daubs of pink paint. Jones, who was starting out as a model at the same time as Smith was a friend; "she called me and told me to come out to Studio 54 and take that one," Smith says. "I knew her before she was 'Grace Jones.' But then again, she already was. Grace was always so free." Smith frequently refers to the most spectral moments in her work as "gifts," and light as "spiritual." Not religious, she clarifies—she means the way Rembrandt uses light or the way Brassaï does. Sometimes the spirit manifests in multiple exposures that create beautifully surprising connections; sometimes it's simply the arresting, ghostlike blur in her portraits that suggests not just an instant, but a trail left behind. Smith's affection for her subjects is as evident in her portrait of Alvin Ailey as it is of mourners watching the great choreographer's funeral procession. In 2001, after a dozen years living in Los Angeles, Smith returned to New York, the city that made her a photographer. She recalls those early days, living in Greenwich Village, heading out on modeling go-sees and eating at cheap diners near Washington Square Park, where she sometimes ran into Lisette Model and her husband eating dinner too. Model's fearless street photographs were an early influence; she was also a friend. "I would ask her questions about love!" Smith says. Just prior to her first acquisition by MoMA, Smith was invited by Lou Draper to join the African American photography collective Kamoinge, whose members included Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks. She recalls meetings at Draper's studio around 18th and Fifth "where all the photographers had studios then— Avedon, James Moore, Arthur Elgort," Smith says. "Lou Draper was a great, generous teacher. You felt safe with him." In her first forays into the darkroom, Smith had forgotten to buy a lens holder and Draper improvised one for her. "So that's where that started," Smith says of the handmade borders that still frame many of her prints with an imprecise, elegiac quality. One of the core Kamoinge principles was the importance of Black photographers portraying Black people, which Smith seized with a surrealistic approach. When she photographed her writer and artist heroes James Baldwin, Romare Bearden and James Van Der Zee, she says, "I needed to present them as they appeared to me: larger than life." The day of my studio visit happens also to be Baldwin's birthday, what would have been his 94th. Smith met him not in Harlem, the neighborhood of his birth and formative years, but France, where he spent most of the rest of his life. "I met him at a jazz festival there in the late 1970s," she says, "but here is where I really feel him. I wanted to show his presence in Black life in Harlem. I wanted to give you something else there, his spirit." It was a humid day in Harlem, and as I bid Smith and Mingus goodbye and walked out in the streets, violet-gray clouds grew and filled overhead, sending down a fine drizzle of rain and calling out the umbrella sellers who always seem to appear out of nowhere on 125th Street. Looking up at the sky, it was impossible not to think of Baldwin looming there. Smith, of course, had put the picture in my head. 200 culturedmag.com Here: James Baldwin, James Van Der Zee and Eubie Blake in Skies of Harlem, Harlem, NY (1979). Opposite: Symmetry on the Ivory Coast, Abijan, Ivory Coast (ca. 1972).

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