Marvin Smith

Marvin Pentz Smith was born on the sixteenth of February 1910 in Nicholasville, Kentucky, one of identical twin brothers born to Charles and Allena Smith, sharecroppers of the Kentucky countryside. He and his twin, Morgan, came of age in rural Kentucky and later in Lexington, where they graduated from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. In 1933 the brothers made their way to New York City and to Harlem, then in the fullness of its renaissance.

There, drawn to art, they studied under the sculptor Augusta Savage and soon turned to the camera. In 1937 they founded their studio on 125th Street, hard by the Apollo Theater, working as one under the name M & M Smith. For three decades, until they closed the studio in 1968, it stood as a Harlem landmark and a gathering place for the community's artists, writers, and entertainers.

Through their lens passed a remarkable procession of Black American life: Billie Holiday, George Washington Carver, Joe Louis, and countless others, alongside dancers, churchgoers, protesters, and ordinary Harlem residents captured with equal care. The brothers photographed both the celebrated and the everyday, and documented civil-rights demonstrations and the texture of the streets around them.

In later years the Smiths turned to film and television, working as sound engineers and set decorators before retiring in 1975. Marvin studied art in France in the company of Romare Bearden and Fernand Léger, and lived until the ninth of November 2003. His portraits were made, in one account, "quietly and affectionately, without fanfare, and most often with great dignity" — a fitting testament to a man who spent his life honoring the faces of his people.