Ming Smith’s Ming Smiths  

Perhaps the most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for “unselfing” … is what is popularly called beauty. … I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. —Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970) Ming Smith’s self-portraits are not of the self as it is usually understood: one’s own person, separate and apart. The difficulty lies in the term self-portrait. Each word on its own suggests singularity and enclosure. The self, contained. The portrait, framed. The compound feels even more tight and fixed and flat, as if the hyphen between the two words were a connector piece between blocks or a tiny arrow tracing the absorption of a living being into a static thing: self → portrait.But, put simply, there are often other people in Smith’s works of that name: Self-portrait with Harlem Boys Choir (1980s); Self-Portrait, Sophisticated Ladies, Phyllis Hyman and Judith Jamison (1980s); Self-Portra...