Claire Millikin – Lights, Camera, Music: Ming Smith’s Jazz Requiem

This spring the Portland Museum of Art housed American photographer Ming Smith’s exhibit Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue (6 February–7 June 2026). I found myself pulled to the show repeatedly while it was on offer in Portland, each time discovering solace and grace in the images’ quality of something like a buoyant witnessing grief. Jazz Requiem reaches a contemplative shading of light’s meaning, a simultaneously sharp and gentle articulation of being human in time. The show’s choices emphasize Smith’s seminal use of light to represent sound in photographs from her Jazz Series, images taken while the photographer traveled Europe with her then husband, jazz musician David Murray, accompanying him and his band as they toured. There is a tender portrait of Murray, waiting in the wings before going onstage that Smith hand-tinted, so that at first glance it seems to be an image from the 19th century, but so large it could only be from the 20th century (it was taken in 1989). Smith’s revolutionary images of jazz clubs and jazz performances track light through manipulated shutter speed, creating the visual equivalent of jazz music’s signature syncopation, mystery, and cool urgency. Yet the images of jazz performances and performers are not the only photographs in this exhibit that make extraordinary use of light.

Light is analog photography’s only essential tool. Photography is light and time, or light that is time (and time that is never light) sealed in a capture medium. Smith’s brilliance is to draw from the essence of her art—light’s mark—a meaning that exceeds its utility. In the photograph Survivor, Smith captures an elderly woman in an unnamed European city climbing ornate stairs in an apartment building. The image carries a decidedly postwar pathos, the woman’s head bent. From above, a paned window is illuminated with dust-stippled light that in Smith’s alchemical art becomes microscopic stars. Standing mesmerized before Survivor, I snapped a shot of the photograph with my geriatric iPhone 7 camera and ended up with a picture that accidentally superimposed my own image onto that of the titular survivor. This mistake has felt to me like a kind of kinship, unearned, surely, but perhaps also this kind of audience fusion with the photographer’s gaze and photographic subject is what Smith’s work intends. The survivor of the photograph’s title is the elderly, white-haired woman climbing the stairs, a woman who it is implied lived through war; perhaps she is a survivor of the Holocaust. And, also, the survivor is the photographer Smith who, born in 1947 (thirty-one years old when she created this image in Europe), spent her formative first two decades of life as an African American woman in the United States, a nation that allowed Jim Crow apartheid laws in the southeast. Smith, the first African American woman photographer with work purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, is a survivor. Her art will survive. Also, in a composite way that gathers as audiences viewing art build together the meaning of that art, my cell phone shot superimposing my own reflection onto the survivor articulates me as a survivor. What I am a survivor is not relevant to this article.

The Jazz Series features gorgeous, sublime photographs of Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, with Sanders’s music imaged as a cascade of light emanating around his saxophone, Smith’s manipulated shutter speed following the rising and sinking of the saxophone so that light appears as emanation from the instrument while Sanders performs at Greenwich Village’s Bottom Line. Smith’s dexterous aperture simultaneously allows the movement of Sanders’s playing to express visually through the glint and glow of light off the bright instrument he holds while the performer’s face remains astonishingly still as if in deep prayer. Sun Ra is caught as a form of a sun god, his cape and glasses glinting almost blindingly bright. Smith works in black and white, occasionally hand painting images, and the afterimages of the photographs are intensely vivid, as if one had dreamed of deities.

Smith’s photograph of Arthur Blythe, Arthur Blythe in Orbit, Jazz Club, Berlin, West Germany, 1981, exemplifies the tension of history’s scarred depth and joy’s stellar reach. The saxophonist who, like Smith, is a survivor of the United States’ regime of racist oppression, plays in a geographical space, the very name of which is marked by war and the separation of Germany after its crimes against humanity. As Blythe plays in a West Berlin jazz club, the music he creates elevates him, his listeners, his watchers, and we too, viewing the photograph nearly half a century later, all rise into that joy in orbit. The lights of the club become stars and the saxophonist enters as an element among them through Smith’s camera work.

On my third visit to the show, my newly graduated son graciously accompanied me, and we converged on the photograph Night Light at the Jazz Club as a masterpiece (for me, there are other masterpieces in this exhibit, but none that use light quite so originally). Night Light at the Jazz Club is almost entirely dark, a lustrous silken silvery dark with two eerily articulated light bulbs on either side suspended like two ears across an invisible mind, two ovaries across an unseen womb, or twinned planets hung across a succulently empty universe. The rich emptiness of the image is a risk that pays off as viewing it draws us deep into a contemplative plane. Here, music is enunciated visually as the turn inward. The image visualizes music as what happens within our minds, bodies, and souls when we listen. The darkness of the image is challenging to reproduce in digital media; the original print is so splendidly tactile in its use of negative space and silver as the capture medium of night, that I show here a snapshot of the experience of viewing the image rather than the image itself.

My connection to music is that of estrangement and deep love. Music is my mother-tongue in the specific sense that my mother was a gifted professional singer and perhaps a not very good mother. She died of a heart attack just before Jazz Requiem opened. In the aftermath of burying her down south this past February, I remembered her mostly through her music: her singing was the part of her that transcended the pain of our lives. I married young to escape that pain and, as it happened, my first spouse was a jazz musician. In my lifelong marriage to my second spouse, jazz music has been a sealed room, too painful to be reencountered. But, of course, jazz historically emerges from and repudiates pain. Smith’s photographic work sings visually of America’s bitter history of racialized capitalism, colonization, and racism. My mother and first spouse were people categorized as whites in our nation’s construct of racial mapping. Does music surpass these boundaries? Ask Billie Holiday, if you speak to ghosts, just how transcendent being a musical genius felt when she was touring in the Jim Crow South. She’d likely say that music did not heal the rift, though her singing of Strange Fruit exposed it. And yet, Smith’s work features joyful images of Alvin Ailey dancers, a resplendent regal portrait of Judith Jamison, brilliantly illuminated at a window, and self-portraits, including one where Smith channels the persona of Josephine Baker, an icon of brilliant resilience.

The startling contrasts of light and dark that Smith’s photographs in the Jazz Series and the images Jazz Requiem pulled to accompany the series should be read with an awareness of how the terms of dark and light have been used to punish and harm people of the African diaspora in our nation. That many of the photographs were taken in Europe gives a sense of the capacity for travel away from the United States and for jazz music, music as such, and art to loosen the fetters. But these photographs also serve as deeper gazes looking into entwined histories of the multiple forms of racism and colonization that shape our world. Smith’s camera is also attuned to a feminist way of seeing and mapping gender.

In Rome and in Spain, Smith photographed nuns congregating and prostrating. In these images, evocatively blurred light catches off the nuns’ habits. I think of these photographs of women at society’s strange and holy edge in conjunction with Smith’s series of self-portraits, two of which are included in Jazz Requiem. Smith’s self-portrait with her camera adds a brilliant play of light to the unavowed tradition of woman photographers’ self-portraits with their cameras, a line extending through the work of Ilse Bing, Vivian Maier, Francesca Woodman, and Courtney Coles. Smith’s self-portrait is happily aware of her elegance, her star-bright place in the space where music and art merge. Lights retreating from the focal point of the photographer’s gaze metaphorically chime with her glistering jewelry. As she squints to see into the camera’s lens, it’s as if she’s also winking at us, acknowledging she sees us seeing and presents herself exactly as she is: forceful, genial, elegant, her wrists exquisite in their skilled knowledge of how to hold the camera’s imaging eye.

In its scope from Rome to Roxbury, Ming Smith’s Jazz Requiem stands as a back-glance at the end of the 20th century from our contemporary vantage. It is haunting to study her work now when the 21st century, our own time, veers off course. The exhibit’s titular requiem is not a requiem for jazz, which will outlast us, but a requiem played in jazz for our broken world. To this brokenness Smith offers a vista of light pulsing as music, as a vivid bodied presence.