The subjects of her portraits are often concealed by an out-of-focus blur. This blur is her most recognisable – and beguiling – technique. She achieves it, she says, by keeping the shutter open while holding the camera very still and hardly breathing. The filmmaker Arthur Jafa argues that the blur is an act of resistance, circumventing ‘the ability of photography to function as evidence’ since ‘you can’t identify anybody.’ According to Jafa, Smith is exercising her Black subjects’ ‘right to opacity’: their freedom from the scrutiny of white society. In Julius + Joanne, her subjects are simply bodies in motion, repositories of light.
But Smith is also defending her own right to abstraction, to an expressiveness and lyricism that go beyond documentation.
On Ming Smith, Adam Shatz
