Aperture Salutes Ming Smith and Zora J Murff on the Occasion of the International Center of Photography Annual Gala
Smith and Murff—both published by Aperture—are among five honorees at ICP’s 2023 Infinity Awards
Zora J Murff, American Mother, 2019, from True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London
On March 28, the International Center of Photography in New York will honor artists Ming Smith for Lifetime Achievement and Zora J Murff for Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism at ICP’s annual Infinity Awards. Aperture is proud to have published first major monographs by Smith and Murff—and we join ICP in celebrating their extraordinary artistic visions and contributions to photography.
Courtesy the artist and Aperture
When Ming Smith was a young photographer and newly arrived in 1970s New York, she passed by the Museum of Modern Art and said to herself, “I’m going to be in there one day.” She was right. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman whose photographs were collected by the museum. Over the next four decades, she made images of astonishing range: cover art for jazz albums, spectral silhouettes of city streets, iconic portraits of Sun Ra and Grace Jones, and a series made in response to the plays of August Wilson. Smith’s first major monograph was published by Aperture in fall 2020 and includes a range of essays and interviews from artists, curators, and writers such as Emmanuel Iduma, Arthur Jafa, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Namwali Serpell, and Greg Tate.
This season, Smith returns to MoMA for the exhibition Projects: Ming Smith, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents the career survey Ming Smith: Feeling the Future. With a technical mastery that underscores her improvisational energy, Smith has made an evocative, sometimes surreal chronicle of Black life and culture. Belated but timely, both exhibitions stand to reintroduce Smith as a major figure in American art who creates poetic images of rare distinction—a photographer who uses light to affirm self-determination and freedom.
Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London
Zora J Murff constructs a manual for coming to terms with the historical and contemporary realities of America’s divisive structures of privilege and caste. Since leaving social work to pursue photography over a decade ago, Murff’s work has consistently grappled with the complicit entanglement of the medium in the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race, often contextualizing his own photographs with found and appropriated images and commissioned texts. Murff’s work is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he was included in New Photography 2020: Companion Pieces.
True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis), published by Aperture in 2022, continues that work, expanding to address the act of remembering and the politics of self, which Murff identifies as “the duality of Black patriotism and the challenges of finding belonging in places not made for me—of creating an affirmation in a moment of crisis as I learn to remake myself in my own image.” Nuanced, challenging, and inspiring, True Colors is a must-have monograph by a rising and standout artist.
