The photographer Ming Smith (b. 1947) has four shows in Ohio this season—a homecoming of sorts, as part of this year’s FotoFocus Biennial. Three of the shows mark the first major exhibitions of her photographs to take place in Columbus, her hometown. The fourth, “Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue,” at the Gund in Gambier, showcases her camera’s encounters with and within Europe. This work is layered, sonic even its empty spaces and silences. The first show, “Transcendence,” on the ground floor of the Columbus Museum of Art, sees Smith grapple with what it means to live in, and remember, a city like Columbus. On a higher floor at the same museum, one can visit “August Moon” (1991), Smith’s smaller-in-scale (but not in scope) cinematic photo series inspired by playwright August Wilson’s 10-play “The Pittsburgh Cycle.” The last big show, “Wind Chime” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, focuses (partly) on dance and movement. It spans Smith’s first ever photography series, “Africa,” begun in the early 1970s, to her newest works, such as a collaboration with her son Mingus Murray: he has crafted a beguiling ambient soundscape, whose tinkling piano-ish notes hit the ear like drops in a wine glass as one walks among collages in tribute to, among many others, Smith’s mentor and hero, the movement philosopher Katherine Dunham.
The meaning of “home” skates nimbly across her photographs: Smith seems at home while exploring. Visiting countries like Senegal and Ethiopia, Smith found a continuity from the Midwestern town she knew consciously to the Africa she was discovering for, and in, herself. “I was touched by the vastness, the serenity, and the timelessness of the land. Seeing all Black people. The people were sashaying in a perfectly choreographed dance,” she said in an interview in Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020). Later in that same interview: “It was like returning home; maybe it wasn’t just Africa, but it was returning home to myself. Ancient ways, daily ways of connecting to spirit.”
Smith left Columbus partly to escape the Jim Crow laws that still dominated Ohio in the mid-20th century. So M. Neelika Jayawardane tells us in her essay in the Aperture monograph. Smith came to New York in 1973 after graduating from Howard University, where she developed as a dancer under the Katherine Dunham technique; as a model; and, on a fashion shoot to Africa, as a photographer. She soon became part of the Kamoinge Workshop of Black photographers: Kamoinge, a Kikuyu word, means “to act and work together as an ensemble.” Restlessness, transformed into dance, informed Smith’s early work: “All of us [were] trying to move up from places we didn’t like, trying to survive.”
Smith, after restlessness, rests. Many of Smith’s Columbus pictures in “Transcendence” are of figures and objects in repose, taking a beat. In Kites Inside (1972), across a bare living-room ceiling and the tops of closed curtains, a fish kite floats in free air, while its brother, a dragon kite, is hitched to a lightbulb, sticking its tongue out at us. Sunlight shimmers through the curtains. Beat: playtime to come. Elsewhere, in October Nightskies (1981), clouds pass over a childhood home, moon peeking out. Beat: what we take for granted. In Aunt Ruth (1979), an elder, her leg raised up in bed, is covered by a translucent blanket, her sleep-inclined outline etched by the same sparkly curtain-clouded light as in the Nightskies. Aunt Ruth, as Jacqueline Woodson’s poem of the same name tells us in a verse caption next to Smith’s photograph, “took to her bed in the middle of the day and was whispered about.” She is “Warrior” and “Revolutionary,” says Woodson; she also takes a beat, harmonizing bed, pain, light, and delight in her resting body.
Aunt Ruth is one of many in Smith’s ensemble, whom she silently directs, adding masks, hats, and character-actor gestures: a cabbie cap here, a slouch in a diner booth between meals there. A few more: the baby in First Haircut (1991), a toddler calmly waiting in mother’s lap like the sacrificial lamb; the white-smocked dude in Cook and Duke (1991), who gawps at Smith’s camera while on his smoke break, blessed from up above by a photograph of Duke Ellington, whose charming open mouth shows that he’s in the middle of making a point; and the man in Man on the Telephone (1991), with his unforgettable, perfectly looped pay-phone cord, as groomed as the man’s sleek leather jacket and striped trousers. Smith shot all these in Pittsburgh, chasing August Wilson’s plays for her “August Moon” series, a collaboration-in-spirit with Wilson. “After I saw August Wilson’s play Two Trains Running, I wanted to go to Pittsburgh and shoot,” she says. How many scenes of Pittsburgh life are possible? Endless: Ming Smith fills in certain blanks, while leaving others.