[The Guardian] ‘New York was a big, bad city’: the hazy, radical photography of Ming Smith

‘New York was a big, bad city’: the hazy, radical photography of Ming Smith

The artist reflects on her storied career amid the launch of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art

Ever since she arrived in New York from Detroit in the early 1970s, Ming Smith says, she’s led an aesthetically rich, if not always financially secure, life. “There was no way to support yourself as an artist back then,” recalls the photographer. “I did it for the love, for the legacy; it was what my life stood for.”

This month, visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York will be able to see a little of that legacy. The new exhibition, Projects: Ming Smith, goes deep into Smith’s archive to draw together images of seminal jazz musicians, such as Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, alongside quasi-documentary images of important sites of Black culture, such as New York’s African Burial Ground, as well as more fluid, impressionistic works, including her August Wilson series, a tribute to the playwright. All these images blur, both figuratively and literally (Smith favours hazy, long exposures), into a body of work in which it’s hard to distinguish the artist behind the camera from the surrounding culture.

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