The T List: Poetic Photographs by Ming Smith

“Spirit works through me,” answers the photographer Ming Smith when asked how she’s able to sense the precise moment at which to snap a picture of someone on the street — just as they walk into the light, say, and their expression changes ever so slightly — so that the resulting image feels candid yet definitive, and deeply intimate. Smith has been creating such images since even before the 1970s, when, bolstered by a debate about whether or not photography is art that she’d overheard while on a modeling assignment, she focused on shooting black-and-white pictures of everyday people in her neighborhood of Harlem. Soon after, she began to apply oil paint on top of certain prints in order to enhance their mood. Eight never-before-seen painted pictures appear in “A Dream Deferred,” a show of Smith’s work at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London. In one, an older woman sits pensively at a diner as if reflecting on time gone by, and melancholy blue streaks suggestive of clouds appear above her head. Also on view are vintage gelatin prints from Smith’s “Invisible Man” (1988-91) series — its title a reference to Ralph Ellison’s novel — for which she photographed her subjects at night, often without a flash and at slow shutter speeds. Yet even when blurred and shrouded in darkness, the figures are impossible to miss. And while the show’s title comes from another work by a writer adept at illuminating Black American life, Smith herself has fulfilled a dream of her father, who wanted to be an artist.