Ming Smith, America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City, New York Painted, 1976
The red paint trickling down the hazy photograph might be the marks of defiance, its subject turned to face the camera head-on in mirrored sunglasses, or these wild streaks could be a symbol of the turbulence that defined America during the 1970s. Through Ming Smith’s overlaid hand-painting, the stripes of the national flag appear to unfurl and break apart, much like a country bitterly divided over questions of race. Smith was the first female African American photographer to have her work in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the first female member of the photography collective Kamoinge Workshop, a group of New York-based black photographers founded in 1963. Yet she has only recently been more widely recognised as a photographer and artist, with her first monograph released this month by Aperture. Her focus is on the racial politics of America, with her hazy black and white photographs of everyday encounters often transformed by double exposure, collage and layers of paint. As she stated in an interview this year, “I guess in my world I just go for things regardless of the boundaries, because I’ve always had to break boundaries.”
This excerpt is part of an extended an article, which can be found below.
