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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

‘This is a rare book,’ Toni Morrison wrote in her introduction to the 1973 edition of The Black Photographers’ Annual ‘It hovers over the matrix of black life, takes accurate aim and explodes our sensibilities’ Among the artists included in the annual was Ming Smith, a photographer who had only been taking pictures for a year, and whose sensibility would prove to be extraordinary    Smith grew up in Columbus, Ohio in the 1960s, and moved to New York in the 1970s after graduating from Howard University, where she studied microbiology While working as a model, she joined the Kamoinge Workshop, an influential collective of Black photographers Smith was the first and only woman to join Kamoinge; in the 1970s she was also the first Black woman to have her work included in the permanent collection at MoMA (As she once memorably put it, the milestone ‘was like getting an Academy Award and no one knowing about it’) An impressionistic chronicler of Black cultural life, Smith’s photographs of street scenes, musicians and churches capture the movement and atmosphere of her subjects in swirls and blurs of light She frequently shoots in dark places – jazz clubs and streets at night – using a slow shutter speed and no flash The effects of this technique can be auratic In Sun Ra Space II, New York City, NY (1978), bright clouds emanate from the figure of the jazz musician Sun Ra, as if his body is shimmering silver   In 2017, Smith became the subject of renewed interest when her photographs featured in Arthur Jafa’s exhibition ‘A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions’, which began at Serpentine Galleries, London and travelled to the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto and the Julia Stoschek Gallery in New York Jafa is an admiring theoriser He reads the blurriness in Smith’s images – particularly in the Invisible Man series, taken between 1988 and 1991 – as an aesthetic language for articulating Black culture, and as a means of shielding her subjects from a policing gaze by obscuring their faces ‘In many of Ming’s photos, you can’t

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Interview

September 2015

Interview with Patrick deWitt

Anthony Cummins

Interview

September 2015

Patrick deWitt’s new novel, Undermajordomo Minor, tells the story of Lucy, a bungling young man hired to assist a...

feature

August 2017

What Makes A Gallery Programme?

Pac Pobric

feature

August 2017

Of his art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Pablo Picasso once wondered, ‘What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t...

poetry

March 2015

Coup & Bell Curve

Elizabeth Willis

poetry

March 2015

COUP   Mallarmé’s gambling astonished everyone even the poets   An acre of paper sold down a river whose...

 

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