The big picture: Huck Finn in 1970s New Jersey

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Pioneering Black photographer Ming Smith captures four boys creating rafts from rubbish in New Jersey

ing Smith photographed the four boys on their backdoor rafts on a pond in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1972. She called the unlikely urban Huck Finn scene, since that’s where one or two of the friends seemed to be aiming for, at least in their heads.

Smith was developing big plans of her own at that time. Detroit-born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, she had arrived in New York a year earlier after graduating from Howard University. Her first published pictures appeared in the inaugural, renownedin 1973. The annual, with an introduction by Toni Morrison, featured the work of artists from the Kamoinge Workshop in Harlem, which was a prime mover in the Black Arts movement. Smith had become the first female member of that group.

Part of that understanding came from wandering the Lower West Side neighbourhood in which she lived, “following the light”, as she describes it, looking for the places, as here, in which it collected and came alive. Her biography wasn’t quite accurate; she had been taking pictures with her dad since she was a girl; at Howard she photographed a young Cassius Clay and went on to take celebrated portraits of everyone from her friend Grace Jones to James Baldwin and Nina Simone.

 

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