Caravan by Ming Smith

Harlem-based, Detroit-born, Ming Smith attended the famous Howard University, Washington, DC. Ming Smith first became a photographer when she was given a camera, and was the first female member to join Kamoinge, a collective of black photographers in New York in the 1960s, working to document black life. Smith would go on to be the first black woman photographer to be included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

Smith’s self-portraits through the years evince a preoccupation with the constructs of femininity, the gaze, race, color, and beauty. In Me As Marilyn (1991), she dolls herself up in a brassy Marilyn Monroe wig, tempting the viewer by thrusting her chest out while wearing a seductive, if somewhat blank, expression. Smith, who often used hand coloring, in addition to collage and overpainting techniques in her work, tinted the Marilyn image with red, pink, and light and dark blues; Smith’s skin tone appears as a dark rose, complicating our racial reading. It could be seen as a race-conscious translation of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe (1967) or of the theatrical self-portraiture of Smith’s contemporary Cindy Sherman. Although Sherman’s playacting highlights gendered stereotypes, Smith’s bravura gesture presses a hot lamp to the ways in which whiteness shapes the desirability and reception of women, evoking not only her own quandaries but those of minority female beauties of Monroe’s time, from Dolores del Río to Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Rita Hayworth.

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