Can a photograph be audible? Are there properties in photographic images that can produce sound waves? Does every photograph have a soundtrack? If we think about the work of photographer Ming Smith, there’s no doubt that it’s possible and, moreover, advisable. Smith’s long career of street photography, mainly in black and white, makes her one of the most special examples of why the act of picking up a camera in search of capturing the things of the world, the sounds of the world, is accompanied by a feeling of immeasurability and, in this sense, also of justice.
Ming’s relationship with music is manifold. This is evident in the images in which the photographer shows us her proximity to the US music scene, and to characters such as Grace Jones, David Murray, and James Brown, as well as countless blues concerts and improvisation ensembles, including trips to Berlin and Cairo. But as well as being thematic, music also drives the poetic process itself and materializes in the dim light of a number of the images, as well as in their blurriness, in the syncopation present in the clarity of the scene or lack of it in photographs such as those that portrait the jazz scene. Also in the effects caused by the shaking and movement of the photographer in her urban observation, which ultimately make photography and music present as manifestations of transparency and invisibility.
In Invisible Man (1988-1991), Ming’s interest lies in the relationship that this title bears with Ralph Ellison’s book of the same name, especially in the aspects that define his character, i.e. the substance, the flesh and blood, the fibres and the mind which, from being hyper-visible, invert their presence into invisibility. In the series, the sound and visual elements described – syncopation, blur, trepidation, low exposure – reach the field of the literary, in which scenes of the communal order, of the nocturnal encounter, of solitary wandering are composed like songs from a double album, with its main tracks as well as its remixes and versions. As a whole, the African-American and Black-diasporic experience in Ming Smith is given by the rhythm, the beat, and the vibrations of the camera on stage, in worship, at a concert, or in everyday life on the street.
