Ming Smith, MoMA review — a photographer who paints with light

In Ming Smith’s famous photograph of Sun Ra, the musician’s head seems to discharge a diaphanous halo of sparks. He looms dazzlingly, his turban and cape aglitter, flooding the band members at his shoulders with his radiance. Some of the players wear sunglasses to shield their eyes. “I follow the light,” Smith has said, “in the movement, in the flight, in the sun streaming, in the darkness pulsing. It’s how the birds are, how the dancers move, how the musicians breathe.”

Smith doesn’t just follow the light; at her best, she generates it, flings it around like pigment, uses it to animate otherwise static tableaux. Luminescence oozes across the surface of her prints, leaving phosphorescent flecks and coronas that bleed into deep shadow. In a portrait of the artist and poet Hart Leroy Bibbs, liquid eyes emerge from a well of inky darkness to meet the lens. The only other source of illumination is a murky glow from a mirror, reflecting what might be a group of musicians on a stage.

Smith has been in living and working in New York for more than 50 years. In 1979, she responded to an open call for submissions at the Museum of Modern Art, where a receptionist mistook her for a messenger. A few days later, she got a call: the guru John Szarkowski and assistant curator Susan Kismaric were offering a stingy $300 for two pictures, making Smith the first black woman to be represented in MoMA’s photo collection. The bolt of prestige didn’t exactly launch her career, though: “Nothing happened for 40 years after that,” she recalled. Until now, I had only ever encountered one or two of her images at a time in scattered group shows.

It would be wonderful to report that MoMA’s retrospective — which two curatorial heavy-hitters, Thelma Golden and Oluremi C Onabanjo, describe as both a “critical reintroduction” and a “deep dive” — finally gives Smith her due. Instead, the museum has stinted again, packing a multi-decade overview into a single room with a slapdash installation. It squanders the set-up with a series of pedestrian views of the Million Youth March in 1998, which was neither the beginning nor the high point of her trajectory. After that, the work gets better, but the show stays meagre and shallow. One wall looks as if it’s been peppered with unframed pieces sprayed from a shotgun. Another has a counterproductively bloated blow-up of the Bibbs portrait, making deliberate haze look like a fourth-generation photocopy.

Is there really no middle ground between this perfunctory glide over a long, ardent career and the exhaustive blowout of the kind that MoMA recently bestowed on Wolfgang Tillmans? Do only fashionable stars deserve serious reconsideration and adequate real estate? Somehow, Smith manages to come off as a marginal presence at her own retrospective, confined to just one segment of her identity, that of Black Woman Photographer.

This “reintroduction”, which doesn’t rate a full-bore catalogue, sent me straight to Google, where I found evidence of a far more varied and richer oeuvre than the museum was letting on. The curators omitted one especially striking picture: “Christmas Constellation, Brussels, Belgium”, in which a small, large-nosed woman in a big overcoat marches impassively past an immense black tree that’s hung with lights and ornaments. Her indifference to the miraculous explosion taking place right beside her, like someone yawning through the Big Bang, gives the scene a specific kind of drama that I suppose didn’t fit neatly with the current theme — even though it’s one of the pair that Szarkowski pounced on.

Smith grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of a technically accomplished amateur photographer. She absorbed his passion, if not his darkroom precision, preferring to cultivate the nuances of nebulousness. She attended Howard University and studied microbiology, with an eye towards medical school — an ambition that lasted until her first contact with clinical gore. Letting go of that dream, she headed for New York, where her beauty landed her a modelling career and supported her creative ambitions.

Golden and Onabanjo didn’t retroactively assign her a mission to explore black experience; she embraced it eagerly from the beginning. Smith spent a lot of time in Harlem, mostly sought out black subjects, and joined the Kamoinge Workshop, a photographic collective dedicated to black representation. But her talent and sensibility never dovetailed perfectly with a group identity. For one thing, she was an outsider among outsiders: in a 1973 group shot of Kamoinge members, she is the only woman in a phalanx of 13 men.

Her strength lies in an idiosyncratic romantic fervour, a way of melting the material world into weightless atmosphere. Through her eyes, we see the Luxembourg Gardens reflected in the water of the Grand Bassin, so that Paris — its tracery of trees, silhouetted figures sitting on a bench, a rearing cliff of neoclassical facades — looks insubstantial, trembling in the merest ripple.

That air of soft-edged mystery permeates her New York, too. In “August Blues” (1991), a woman in a short print dress appears to speed past a poster-plastered wall so briskly that body and street both dissolve into vibration and nearly abstract blur. Smith achieves these effects of hummingbird-like motion by slowing the shutter, a paradoxical meeting of speed and deceleration that resonates with her mixtures of darkness and shine. The result elides the distinctions between figure and background, solid and air, the seen and the felt. That elusiveness makes her the ideal photographer of music, and especially of a musician-mystic such as Sun Ra, who confounded anyone who tried to understand him by proclaiming: “I’m not real, I’m just like you.”

To May 29, moma.org