August 12 – August 21, 2026

Special Edition: Ming Smith

For one week only, purchase a pre-release limited edition print by Ming Smith, in view of the release of her first book of color photographs In The Presence of Spirit, coming out this Fall with Dashwood Books and Speciwomen.

All proceeds from this print sale's go to the artist for the maintenance of her archive and practice.

About the publication

Ming Smith, In the Presence of Spirit co-published by Dashwood Books and Speciwomen brings to light never-before-published color images from one of the most important photographers of the twentieth-century and an iconic American voice. It is the first monograph presenting Ming Smith’s color photographs. Only a handful of Smith’s works in color have ever been published or exhibited before. Compiling the selection of 200 photographs presented here involved digitizing her entire color archive of 1,000s of color transparencies and negatives shot throughout Smith’s career alongside her black and white work, dating from the late 1970s. It presents a broad scope of her practice from portraiture, documentary, to the experimental nature of her work that began to emerge in the 1980s. Included are early family photographs, and decades of documenting major cultural icons in jazz, dance, and theater as well as abstracted and painted over transparencies, prominent themes that make Ming Smith a pioneer of formal experimentation, Black interiority, and spiritual presence. The book features contributions by Arthur Jafa, Fred Moten, an extended essay by Namwali Serpell, and several poems by Jacqueline Woodson.

Pre-orders (SIGNED) available here.

About the artist

Ming Smith (Born in 1947 in Detroit, U.S.A. Lives and works in New York, U.S.A.) has spent five decades making photographs that blur the line between document and dream. In 1972, she joined Kamoinge, the Black photography collective, as its only woman. In 1979, she became the first Black woman photographer whose work entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her photographs are held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others.