Ming Smith: Filmday

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Ming Smith….

“Smith was the first Black female photographer acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the first female member of the influential Black photography collective, Kamoinge. She was one of the first African American women to break the color barrier in modeling alongside Grace Jones and Toukie Smith. Gordon Parks wrote of Smith, stating her “wonderous imagery… gives eternal life to things that might well have been forgotten.” Her works respond to the struggles of city living, while also celebrating the community and pride produced by it. Taking her camera with her as she travelled the world, these images are a chronicle of her discerning eye.”

Ming Smith — getting something…

Make do.. Make more with what you have. The doing is the art part.

And

The things we use are not requirements for where we get.

First questions are common among those who achieve influence and those who remain on side steps. The tournament doesn’t reward new shoes as much as it does new views … the runner who gets further is able to stay longer.

More..

“As an artist, recognition for her work only came recently thanks to several high-profile exhibitions. Not limited to photography she also uses post production techniques, collage and paint to create her works. Smith was recently included in ‘Soul of a Nation’ at Tate Modern in collaboration with Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges and The Broad. She was also featured in Brooklyn Museum’s ‘We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.’ Smith’s work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. She was included in MoMA’s 2010 seminal exhibition, ‘Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography’.” https://mingsmithstudio.com/about

it is better to be craft poor and picture rich

RL/webionaire

tech Tuesday: Visual Mind

Posted on Posted in creativity, overnight notes, visual mind

Diffusion sheets as dodging devices. Frederick Sommer. Key thinker. And he was very much a thinker; about photography in the specific and in the other bigger container.

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.
The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions
Frederick Sommer General Aesthetics, 1979
Words not spent today
buy smaller images tomorrow
Frederick Sommer(Aperture, 1962

Enlargers: darkroom notes

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, labnotes, minimum daily requirement, the Lab1 Comment

A box of old guides serves more information than a web of 20 thousand posts.

Defects, negative and print errors. These are from 1950s darkroom brochures that the emulsion makers provided.

Not much has changed… just who is making the mistake.

About enlargers and an overview of what making prints would have been like. Defender became Dupont, one of my first film/paper experiences. Remains my most missed photo company.

In the “blue” above, see the callout of an enlarger. That is a condenser enlarger.

In this image is shown a diffusion enlarger. I’ve marked the two sections which, if made variable, make the diffusion controllable.

In my way of working, I use all three forms of light: Point, Condenser, and Diffused.

Each has advantage, so why limit my range // if you know how, use that knowledge.