Ming Smith

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12 Photobooks That Celebrate Black Voices and History

From Arielle Bobb-Willis’s vividly playful tableaux to Ernest Cole’s incisive photographs of America in the late 1960s, here are essential titles to read this Black history month.

13 Photobooks that Highlight Black Lives and Artistic Visions

From monographs by Awol Erizku and Deana Lawson, to collections on fashion, community, and power, here are essential titles to read this Black History Month.

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

11 Essential Photobooks for Black History Month

From monographs by Ming Smith and Deana Lawson to compendiums about activism and fashion, here are must-read books that envision Black lives.

The Black Photographers Rethinking What History Is All About

In these 11 photobooks from Kwame Brathwaite to Deana Lawson, artists envision beauty and poetry, fashion and resistance.

Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa on Ming Smith’s “Acts of Love” in Photography

In the 1970s, Smith immersed herself in jazz music, producing images with her signature poetic blur—and exploring what Tate and Jafa call the “maroon fugitivity” of Black postmodern life.
Ming Smith, Two Pool Players, Pittsburgh, 1991

Ming Smith’s Photographic Tribute to August Wilson

Smith’s images from the Hill District in Pittsburgh, the neighborhood immortalized by Wilson’s plays, evoke the rhythms of everyday Black life.
Anthony Barboza, Kamoinge Members, 1973

The Belated Celebration of the Kamoinge Workshop

In the 1970s, a group of photographers made poetic, affirmative representations of Black life. But why did most museums fail to recognize or validate their efforts?

These Radical Black Women Changed the Art World

Behind the scenes of the Brooklyn Museum’s landmark exhibition about revolutionary feminist artists.

5 Exhibitions to See in February

From protest images to the poetics of architecture, here are this winter’s must-see photography exhibitions in New York.

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Aperture No. 257

Aperture presents “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI,” a timely and urgent issue that explores how artificial intelligence is quickly transforming the field of photography and our broader culture of images.

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