Further explore the exhibition’s themes of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to these works.

Transcript
Narrator: Three impressionistic black-and-white photographs from Ming Smith’s extensive "Invisible Man Series" elegantly demonstrate several distinct features of her natural-light observational photography style. These include shooting in low light, blurred images, capturing movement with a slow shutter speed, hand-held camera shake, and allowing the edges of a film negative to bleed into the print.

In the current era of cellphone cameras, spontaneous events of everyday life are often thoughtlessly documented or perhaps carefully staged in digital photographs. Ming’s Harlem-based photographs were made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They document the people and places she encountered with an air of spontaneity that feels especially intentional and unpolished, from an era before today’s ubiquitous and instantaneous access to digital photography.

Because the images are dimly lit at night or blurry, the people in them are not easily identified, if they can be at all. In this way, Ming is not surveilling the neighborhood. She captures the vibrancy of a place while protecting the people in it with anonymity. In an interview, Ming has compared her photography to jazz, in that she uses what she has—her camera, film, and the light available where she is—and makes something of the moment she’s in. This series is titled in honor of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 book titled Invisible Man.

In "'Lil’ Brown Baby Wif Spa’klin Eyes,'" from 1991, a Black toddler stands in a large fabric playpen, which is set on a sidewalk in front of a graffitied brick storefront, refuse scattered by the building. The child leans casually on the edge, watching the world go by. An adult is walking past the toddler, rendered a ghostly blur as he moves too quickly for the slow shutter speed to capture him solidly.

"Past Any Reason For Song," edited from 1988, was shot on a dark night and wavers as if taken underwater. This is characteristic of the camera shake created by taking a picture with the shutter open for a long time. The photographer’s beating heart and the rise and fall of breathing prevent the stillness a tripod would provide. The scene is a street corner with an unlit apartment above a dry cleaners, light coming from just one streetlamp and a brilliantly bright window by the cleaners. The streetlight is elongated from the shake, and one of the several pedestrians has smeared into seemingly three people as they pass the long-open camera.

"Stoop," from 1988, feels still and serene. Two Black men sit on the steps of an apartment building stoop, hands resting on their legs. They are lit only by two bare bulbs on an ornate arch over the building door, number 107. The two bulbs’ light only reaches far enough to highlight the white hair of one man, the pale beret on the head of the other, their arms, and bits of the stair railing, but just barely. Faint outlines of the building and nearby objects are like whispers as the scene feels like it disappears into a gentle embrace of the dark night.

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