Ming Smith (b. 1947, Detroit, Michigan) captures everyday life through a transcendent and ethereal lens. Her work has a collaborative nature, often featuring legends of the art, music, and literary world of Harlem and beyond. Smith documents everyday moments of Black life, whether it be legends such as Grace Jones and James Baldwin or an anonymous passerby on the street— she creates a dreamlike poignancy for every subject. Smith creates a deliberate blurriness with experimental post-production techniques such as double exposed prints, which amplifies the sacredness of Black life while creating dream-like and vibrational images. Smith played an integral and steadfast role in the New York art scene in the later decades of the 20th century. 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.