Visual art
Ming Smith
born 1951 · photographer
Detroit-born photographer, the first African American woman photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Field
- Visual art
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Ming Smith was born in Detroit and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She studied at Howard University in Washington and moved to New York, where she worked as a model while developing a distinctive photographic style: blurred motion, deep shadows, double exposures and street scenes that feel like music in visual form. She was the first woman to join the Kamoinge Workshop, the influential collective of Black photographers founded in Harlem in the 1960s, and she photographed jazz musicians, dancers and everyday life in Harlem and beyond, including portraits of Sun Ra and Grace Jones. In 1979 the Museum of Modern Art acquired her work, the first photographs by an African American woman to enter its collection. After decades of limited attention, major exhibitions and a monograph in the 2020s brought her wide recognition. Her Detroit connection is her birth; her career was built in New York.
Highlights
- First African American woman photographer collected by MoMA (1979)
- First woman member of the Kamoinge Workshop
- Known for blurred, musical images of jazz and Harlem life