Ming Smith, N.Y.C.

In 1963, a group of talented Black photographers in New York City led by Louis Draper formed the artist collective known as Kamoinge. At just nineteen years old, Anthony Barboza was one of the first and also the youngest to join the independent artists who had been generally excluded from shows and support from mainstream museums and art galleries in the city. Barboza soon left for three years of service in the U.S. Navy, but upon his return rejoined Kamoinge and set up his own portrait studio which he operated for half a century. Barboza commented on the influence of Kamoinge on his own early development as an artist: “I noticed that when the Kamoinge members took photographs, there was a spiritual relationship with the subject. You are looking at the subject but you are feeling the photographer as well. That’s why photography is autobiographical, more than people realize.”



Barboza made this wide-angle, nighttime portrait of the photographer Ming Smith in front of the fountain at The Met soon after she joined Kamoinge around 1973. Seen from below and up close, Smith leans backward toward the fountain jets and appears as if she is rising from the waters like sea serpent. The composition also appears like a human eye with Smith’s head as its iris. The photograph visualizes their close collaboration and celebrates the essence of “Kamoinge” which comes from the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together.”