The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 42

pen + brush x of note
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We Are the Work
By Miriam Romais
To the average person, photography is
about looking. Capturing and preserving
what exists in the world to one day,
perhaps, reflect back on it. But how does
this process change, if your heart’s desire
is to create what you feel instead? One
could argue that looking and seeing are
two different things, just as feeling and
sensing are not equal. Think about what
matters most to you. What do you love? Is
it something you can see and touch, or do
you simply sense it in the depth of your
bones with every certainty of what there is
in the world?
While traditional documentary images
evoke a very specific time and place, Ming
Smith’s images reveal themselves more as
a sensory experience. It’s as if she’s netted
ideas out of the air as they float past like
fireflies, with their singular brightness and
innate deliberateness.
Smith has been called a pioneer and
a visionary, striving for a communal
wholeness alongside her peers as they
steadfastly documented the resilience
of their communities, counteracting
stereotypes polluting the mainstream
consciousness. Smith, however, shows the
love, strength, and dignity in her own way,
holding space for others while flipping the
narrative on how things are expected to
be shown. With moxie, she makes her own
rules. This is work from the corazón, just as
her name is Ming Corazón Smith. the pyramid, the sphinx, and over to her
sons where she sits, evoking queens and
deities presiding over their fortress and
fortune. Her wrapped face becomes the
window, in which the past and present
merge. hidden by the flower, the lace. She is there,
yet obscured by the ghostly images of
others. We sense Smith, as she sees Egypt
and is transformed by it, while subverting
gendered colonial expectations of where
and how a woman ought to be in the world.
In Womb (1992), Smith’s two sons stand in
strong martial art stances as she uses her
camera to preserve a family trip to Cairo.
However, the universe had other plans,
inserting its own glitch into the recipe
by presenting a superimposed image of
herself. Smith becomes an energy carried
horizontally across the entire frame—past In Masque (1992), she sits on that same
wall embracing her younger son Mingus.
We see this unintended quality again,
what she can only explain as a gift. At first
glance, one might dismiss the images as
captured through glass. But step back and
look. Can you see yourself? Move in and
be immersed. See how she is present but Weeping Time (1988) involves a purposeful
reflection, as Smith’s silhouette is clearly
depicted while an elder walks by. In
this moment, she is reminded of her
grandmother, and the years of experience,
love, and pain that come from the wisdom
of knowing and seeing too much. Smith
envisioned Weeping Time as a reference
Image from previous page: Ming Smith, Weeping Time, Atlanta, GA, 1988. 35 mm black-and-white photography with oil paint,
archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
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Women’s Work
Ming Smith, Womb, Cairo, Egypt, 1992. 35 mm black-and-white photography, archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches.
Courtesy of the artist.