Ming Smith
Born 1947 in Detroit, USA.
Lives and works in New York, USA.
Ming Smith is a foundational figure in American photography whose work surveys Black interiority, spiritual presence, and formal experimentation. In 1972, she joined Kamoinge as its only woman member, and in 1979 became the first Black woman photographer whose work was acquired by MoMA. Working primarily in black and white, Smith uses light as a tool for personal, political, and metaphysical inquiry. Smith’s work has been presented internationally including at the MoMA, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo and at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Her work is held in prominent public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm among others.
Wandering Light offers an expanded view of Ming Smith’s practice, situating her work within a broader photographic, art‑historical, and geographic horizon. Bringing together images spanning several decades, the exhibition positions Smith not only as a pivotal figure in American photography, but as an artist whose vision was shaped through sustained encounters with Europe—its cities, museums, and long photographic traditions— and through an ongoing, exploratory engagement with the medium itself.
Moving through cities such as Paris and Rome, Smith entered environments saturated with art history while remaining acutely aware of her positionality as a Black American woman. These journeys did not result in quotation or homage; instead, they cultivated a way of seeing attuned to gesture, rhythm, and emotional charge. Classical photographic concerns with light and composition echo throughout her work, yet they are quietly unsettled by blur, motion, and colour, producing images that hover between appearance and disappearance.
Smith’s photographs foreground softness and movement—blurred contours, spectral figures, and cityscapes that feel remembered rather than recorded. These are not stylistic effects but deliberate modes of attention. Faces dissolve, bodies merge with their surroundings, and identity remains unresolved, shaped by time, light, and lived sensation.
Smith’s images offer a quiet yet profound reorientation, resisting the impulse to categorize Blackness as stable or legible. Instead, they insist on Black interiority as fluid, complex, and deeply human. She does not photograph identity to define it, but to allow it to remain open: luminous, vulnerable, and in continual formation.
Smith approaches the medium as a porous field, absorbing the logics of painting, drawing, and performance. Color operates like pigment, blur becomes mark‑making, and the photographic frame functions as a site of encounter rather than enclosure.
Wandering Light positions Ming Smith at the threshold of photographic history—where the medium opens onto new ways of perceiving, feeling, and being.
Daisy Desrosiers
Venue
Église Sainte-Anne
Curation
Daisy Desrosiers
Exhibition produced by the Rencontres d’Arles. With support from Sézane.
Prints and wallpapers
Processus, Paris
Mounting
Mimesis, Paris
Framing
Circad, Paris
Publication
Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph, Aperture, 2020.
Practical Information
Festival dates: July 6 July – October 4, 2026
Opening Week: 6–12 July, 2026
All-exhibitions pass: €42 (reduced: €33)
www.rencontres-arles.com/en
