This photo is part of a series in which Ming Smith portrays the iconic entertainer and Civil Rights advocate Josephine Baker. Born in America in 1906, Baker had brief stints as a chorus dancer in New York during the Harlem Renaissance, but her breakout to stardom came to pass after she began performing in Paris. Known for her iconic banana skirt, Baker manipulated and counteracted her audience’s prejudiced expectations and became an overnight sensation for her singing, dancing, and comedy. After becoming a French citizen in 1937, Baker contributed to the French resistance movement during World War II. Post-war, Baker periodically returned to the United States and became increasingly involved in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement throughout the 1950s, going so far as to speak alongside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington in 1963; she was the only woman listed as an official speaker. Baker passed in 1975, only a little more than a decade before Smith created this photo series, but by her passing she was already an undisputed icon of the 20th century.

Ming Smith’s diverse photographic oeuvre defies typical categorization. Arriving to New York City in the early 1970s after studying at Howard University, Smith became the first woman to join the Kamoinge Workshop, the landmark African American photography collective of the Civil Rights era. Her engagement with that critical discourse sharpened her focus as a photographer, and helped her develop some of her signature tools: careful application of motion blur, strong contrast of light and darkness, double exposures, and hand-alterations, all contributing to the psychically-charged atmosphere and sense of emotional ambiguity running through her practice. Exploring both street photography and controlled studio environments, Smith’s work resists straightforward narratives or didactic symbolism, instead respecting the elusiveness, specificity, and complexity of Blackness, and the diverse lived experiences of Black people in the world today.