foto von ming smith (zwischenzeitlich auch als ming murray bekannt), 1978 aufgenommen. aus einem ziemlich brillanten essay von namwali serpell, der in einem smith-katalog abgedruckt ist, der im oktober erscheinen wird:
In Smith’s many photographs of black musicians with brass instruments in underlit spaces, chiaroscuro is abstracted and intensified. This isn’t black and white, but dark and shine; we’re not just blending and bleeding and blurring, but shifting and shaking and shuddering. Shine stammers through degrees across the dark, leaving prismatic trails, flame-like scribbles and warps. The result is less of a glissando across absence and presence and more of a rhythm—a syncopated scatting of them. This is how Ming Smith evokes the precision, uncanniness, and joy of Sun Ra’s metaphysics of bright blackness.
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