The Haunting Revelations of Ming Smith’s Portraiture

When I sat beside Ming Smith and her son Mingus at The Kitchen, during New York’s spring gala last year, it felt more like a reunion than a first encounter, though we had never met before that night. I’d previously seen some of my favorite musicians through Ming’s piercing eye-as-lens, as gauntlet, often captured in the meta-performative and vulnerable blur wherein the concept of posing cannot intervene to glamor and usurp an otherwise perfectly articulate gesture in between laugh and scream or twirl and collapse or backstage and showtime. There is a part of speech, and specifically of black speech, that exists exclusively in the microtones between acts and gestures, as slurring and slowing down and speeding up tempos and shutters at will as if shivering or stuttering, to assert psycho-spiritual sovereignty over a procession of events, but one needs perfect visual pitch to notice and isolate these microtones, like scatting with the eyes, and it can cost you a lot, it can send you into an uninvited spiral or trance of almost and all-at-once. Many nervous systems give out and collapse the infinite, unseen permutations between motion and stillness into gibberish or slurs, and the few who can decipher the subtle and esoteric language there cannot translate it into static art objects, x-rays, and proof of several timelines stretched into the matter of evidence of things not seen but felt in the incarnadine.

Ming not only enacts impossible translations of the space between events, bodies, and the souls and spirits animating them; it is her native language and she annotates the unsayable with such seeming ease that her photographs feel in the body like extended visceral gasps and reckonings with neglected forces cradling the flesh as light or what is called aura, the first body, mer-ka-ba. With what masquerades as passing, demuring, glance, we enter territories so private and transgressive and universal simultaneously, it’s as if trespassing past the caution tape at a crime scene and into Studio 54, or a secret recording session encoding a hidden album on the one that might be released to the public. And even as there’s a rapture and awe inherent in Ming’s proximity to her subjects, and the intimacy of how she shreds the most stalwart personas and scenes until they are genuflect in front of her, asking to be seen by her alone like prayers, the allure of her singular style and approach is not about access or flaunt. Her emotional impact is attached to how she reaches the unknown and illicit and makes them accessible without robbing her subjects of dignity or privacy. She compels spectacle to turn on itself, cave in, and surrender to its guts and interior where things that can’t hold up and be felt, disappear into the fatuous ash as false light. Each of her photographs of an artist alone is a very clear duet with that artist, who is made to marionette or waltz in Ming’s presence, and collaborate with her on a two-way self-portrait, doubling, mutating.

It makes sense that collectives inflect the era Ming came of age within, when literature, jazz music, and dance and visual culture were forming a hydra identified spectrally and solidified retroactively as The Black Arts Movement alongside Free Jazz, and “energy musical.” Radicalism was casual and en vogue and more than just identity was at stake, the survival of communities of people and their labor seemed more important than individual accolades though these moments did produce leaders who became stars. There was just enough polish and lore inflating the contiguous communities of black artists throughout New York and Europe, to render them the subjects of rumors and projections; for a time I think many really suspected these collectives would overturn the push toward neoliberalism. Ming inhabited that limbo and made it a bridge light and sound could traverse whenever the inevitable need for migration arises. Her photographs are migratory, fugitive, between worlds but not haunted by linear time and how it is branded so that they are also quantum, allowing these worlds to coexist and feed one another, body and soul, like the jazz standard calls for. Many of her photographs have the texture of being captured on the set of a film that has yet to be made or written or conceived besides by her, but the casting is in order and formidable, so deliberate it hurts to be left off the list, so extensive you see yourself in the fray of Sun Ra’s cape or as the tulle on Grace Jones’s statuesque tutu, you can imagine your way into a scene and live it with them.

“Angst” is the first photo Ming sold, she tells me proudly but modestly. After graduating from Howard in the early 1970s, when she’d began modeling part-time to sustain her art practice. The first revenue earned from a photograph came from an image of Amiri Baraka, blues poet, writer and composer of Blues People, the first book on black music by a black writer. His debut and most maudlin collection of poems was titled Preface To a Twenty Volume Suicide Note; Ming’s replica of him is as a survivor of his own dread, gone electric. It’s his Dylan moment, his break with the paces of folk forms to rage in a half-afro, which he halos with his own hands, miming the act of pulling it out like yanking sunrays from a sheath as if they were swords, which thoughts can be, and threatening to turn them on himself or succumb to the wounds they’ve already inflicted. Ming’s tender voyeurism, the very fact that she captures this gesture, this bliss of private anguish and the dignity of a witness who won’t blame you for buckling in that moment, is a mothering, a safety net for a figure who always seemed protected, spared at the crucial precipice when he was being hunted and nearly taken under by forces seen and unseen, beaten nearly to death, blacklisted. This work instantiates Ming as part of the Black Arts Movement but also as someone who cannot be contained even by the collectives that embraced her. Hers are inscriptions without dogma as if scouting uncharted black movement to choreograph a long ensemble across images that only those invited backstage and behind the curtain have imagined. She lets the menace hang out as much as pleasure, and you never notice her gaze, just her touch and timbre on the camera, her decelerated shutter, the shuddering at beauty in a truce with angst.

Come back, Pharoah, Amiri Baraka chants in a song for the ancients. In Ming’s photograph of Pharoah Sanders at the Bottom Line, 1977, with his saxophone in hand and pillars of ominous neon emanating from him like nets or traps, he is the sullen sovereign who doesn’t desire our attention but submits to it with the piety of a choir prodigy withholding his scripture of the downbeat. He’s navigating inner turmoil and only giving us the reprieve he discovers at the end of private brooding, stoicism that misses and exposes some worry or over-thinking. The photograph catches him mourning and backs away slowly. It gets the private dejection in Pharaoh, that he only transcends in his playing. His speech, (he is man of few words, carries) is the cadence of someone weary but not bitter. He seems shy and lacking in confidence in some interviews, or ashamed to recount moments when he had to donate blood to survive, then he plays the roof off Birdland, then he tells us the best musicians he’s ever heard are his aunts who sing in church in Arkansas, who will never be famous. I imagine him thinking of them in this image, and hiding his face in their palms.

The conflicted exuberance of a masterpiece. Finally we get Jimmy Baldwin alone. He’s seated in a vacant church. He looks mischievous and a little hurt or pensive at the same time. He looks this way often in photographs but in this case he also appears to be on the cusp of delight and a private revelation he’ll never have to publish or sermon about. Maybe he’s imagined the eulogy Baraka would eventually deliver for him in Harlem, as Ming performs an autopsy of his eternal spirit.

So many men. It’s a man’s world, especially in the 1960s and ‘70s, but up jumps Grace Jones, ruthless, androgynous intervention, a punk ballerina so delicate and rigid and wild. Ming and Grace are friends. She would receive last-minute invitations to Studio 54 and see Grace live during the three legendary years the club dominated New York night life. They would make glamour their gauntlet, their grammar together. Grace Jones, relentlessly herself, is most like herself, most kinetic and statuesque, in Ming Smith’s images of her. Earlier this month I watched Grace live at the Hollywood bowl, and searched her visage for this version, which emerged in a moment of near-cackling into crying into singing “Amazing Grace,” how sweet, how vicious a song sounds when interpreted by its only rightful muse.

Judith, an Alvin Ailey principal dancer, had been photographed more in costume than in her own wardrobe by the time Ming took her portrait in 1980. She wears a bedazzled gown and backs away from the lens as if it’s a threat. She resembles a 1920s flapper. When Jamison died recently, it became clearer that this was the only public image of her as herself from that time. She seems perturbed by the thought of it, peaking out from the border of a curtain she hopes will shroud her, as if she’s really time traveling and doesn’t want to get caught being decadent in the wrong decade. Another function of Ming’s work is its ability to archive what would otherwise have been missed or narrowed by lesser collective reflexes.

Ming’s photos of herself don’t do her justice, nor are they meant to. They’re studies and curiosities, not vanities. They remind me of Malcolm X, holding his camera which he loved, not quite sure how beautiful he was but just sure enough to check and keep a record. They are whimsical with a hint of severity and terror, shy but not lacking in confidence or clarity. You get the feeling of a dancer catching herself in the mirror during rehearsal. You study the steps, not the body performing them, the gestures themselves as they fit into the music.

Once upon a time I dreamed of being a jazz musician’s wife, but not while he was alive, from the time of having been widowed and liberated to roam through gusts of ghost, still idealizing a man who, by remaining alive might have turned me into a glorified domestic worker. This was one of my interpretations of creative freedom, being haunted rather than interrupted, love at a safe, devastating distance from which it would even return to infatuation and become my muse, but not a muse from whom I extract, one I accompany and compensate for like a favorite flaw that makes a face or soul more beautiful. Ming’s photos live that dream, and darn that dream, they announce that it both is and isn’t all it’s thought to be. She did marry a jazz musician. Her son Mingus wears her name as it opens into the name of another jazz musician and aims to carry all three torches. I see in her work that afterglow of lives I’ve almost lived and either rejected or forgotten, I see the traces of versions of myself I might become by stepping into some phantom light that’s not quite a spotlight and not quite dim enough to be anything but that, and slurring my steps with my words so they are music together, poems. Ming’s eye makes heroes out of almosts, chances, insinuations, recoils, hidden in plain sight places. It is elegy and celebration, where we are buried when bodies turn to ash or crude oil, in the space limning thoughts, notes, strides, the gasp of a gap-toothed black experience where what cannot be said is confessed as doing.

Harmony Holiday is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working across dance, film, music and archives of black culture. She is the author of five collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa, and has published work in the New Yorker, Bookforum, Harper’s, Paris Review, The Drift, and more.