One of two photographic homages Ming Smith created to Josephine Baker, this self-portrait reveals the darkness underscoring the glamour of one of the most popular mainstream icons of Black beauty available at that time.
The first Black woman to ever star in a major motion picture, Josephine Baker was an American-born French dancer and singer of explosive popularity who rocked Europe with her performances of the racialized, exotic femme archetype.
Posed in defensive contrapposto, her right arm draped elegantly but protectively, Smith takes viewers' gaze on directly. Her eyes betray a guarded mix of emotions — barely contained indignation, poised accusation, and an unassailable pride, among others.
Paper cut-outs of a cheetah (Baker famously owned a pet cheetah named Chiquita that would hang out in the orchestra pit of her shows), two birds, and a monkey crowd the staged scene. Deliberately artificial, these additions are visibly and uncannily taped down. One bird hangs stiffly upside down. The monkey’s shape has been cut crudely, leaving only a head and a paw which rests heavily on Smith’s shoulder, as if restraining her. Her pointed inclusion of chains — one held tightly in her fist and around the cheetah’s neck, and another forming the stylized tail of the monkey — alludes to the complicated conditions of Josephine Baker’s career: having to play into the colonial imagination in order to gain the unprecedented independence and influence that she wielded.
In this powerful act of artistic impersonation, Smith complicates the lines between object and subject, model and artist, muse and fetish, artifice and visibility.
