In 2010, rocker Patti Smith tackled prose as she had poetry years before, winning the National Book Award with Just Kids, a memoir of youth and art in early `70s New York. It was a myth-building era for the city, and even more so for Smith, whose paramours of the day included future stars Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard.
Photographer Judy Linn’s 2011 monograph, Patti Smith 1969-1976, tells much the same story, with images rather than words.
Linn’s then boyfriend, painter Peter Barnowsky, knew Mapplethorpe, and a circle was formed. A student at Pratt, Linn learned to shoot literally as Smith learned to pose, with the pair sculpting the latter’s iconic Keith Richards cum Jeanne Moreau look in the process. Some snaps, like the unedited cover shot for Smith’s noisy 1976 opus Radio Ethiopia, are familiar. Others, a wide view of Smith as a pre-stardom boho queen (also featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s “Who Shot Rock & Roll” exhibit in 2009), are revelatory.
The pictures—at digs in Brooklyn, 23rd Street, and the Chelsea Hotel—are pretty and gritty. In the first images, Smith is a doe-eyed wisp of 22. But she’s also posed in a mess of a room, with hairy legs and stretch marks (from a teen pregnancy), clad in boy’s underwear and a torn shirt. Together, they are redefining beauty.
Selections from Patti Smith 1969-1976 will be on display in Albany, at the College of Saint Rose’s Esther Massry Gallery, through February 28. Also included in “My Land/Patti Smith and Other Things, Photographs by Judy Linn” will be a series of Detroit images from the same era. Linn will sign books and speak at the school on February 7.
An adjunct professor of photography at Vassar College, Linn was frazzled when we talked on the phone, fresh off a drive through the industrial wilds of New Jersey, but her photos speak with a ragged eloquence.
Movies were a shared language for you and Patti Smith?
I grew up more on movies than books because I wasn’t a very big reader. Patti was an enormous reader, but what we really had between us was the fact that we both loved movies. It was a rich repository of images that we could draw from.
We both liked Georges Franju a lot. He was an interesting director. He didn’t get much attention because the New Wave was coming on, but he made some great movies—Les Yeux sans Visage, Therese Desqueyroux, Judex.
And the thing about living in the city was that you could see them. The first time I saw Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes without a Face) was on 42nd Street. Patti sat behind me. She went with a boyfriend and I went by myself. She screamed and pounded the chair through the whole movie. She got so excited and so into the movie that it was distracting.
What made Smith and Mapplethorpe good models?
They were both very beautiful and had a great sense of style. Patti was great because she would play with me and spend time. Robert was good for awhile, but he started taking pictures, and once he did that, he wasn’t really available. I didn’t take pictures of him after that.
In 1978, Stereo Review writer Steve Simels noted Smith’s almost feral awareness of the process, saying, “The minute she saw [the photographer’s] hands move anywhere near the camera, she immediately ‘became’ Patti Smith and stared the lens down.”
Well, a lot of people had been taking pictures of her by that point, so I’m sure she was aware of what was going on. She was always in a moment of self-invention.
She would say, “You have to take pictures of me in the morning. I can look really bad. I can look like [Swiss-born Modernist poet] Blaise Cendrars.” She’d smoke a cigarette and the smoke would get in her eyes and she’d get all squinty and greasy haired. It was fun. It was just another persona to play with. She wasn’t a girly girl. She could play with what being female was.
Did you feel like you were creating a specific look?
I think you’re coming at it from the wrong direction. You’re looking back at it regarding a person who has a public persona, an image. I was coming from the other direction: Here’s a friend who likes to play. We can dress up and we can pretend and we can have a good time. I didn’t see success on the horizon. I just thought it was fun in the moment.
You use the term “imaginary past” in your essay for the book.
It was a way to end that essay in a way that opened a door. It was also my way of saying “Don’t believe these pictures.” When I see a group of photos, I love the fact that it feels like this is a place you can go to; this is a real thing; this is something that happened.
It’s like Eugene Atget’s Paris. It takes me a long time after I look at the photographs to realize, oh yeah, this isn’t real, you can’t go there—this is 1920s Paris and it’s not that way now.
It’s the same thing with doing a book of Patti. I wanted it to be a place where you felt you could go, but in the end you have to realize it’s not real. The past is a story, the future’s a dream.
Mapplethorpe, as a subject, figures heavily in the book. Were you a fan of his work?
Hmmm. When he first started, he was doing Polaroids. There was one I remember—shooting down into the center of a brown paper bag from above—that I thought was terrific. I love his picture of Jesse McBride as a little boy, sitting on the back of a chair, which actually got [him] into a lot of trouble because it became considered kiddie porn. He did a couple portraits of Marcus Leatherdale, who was his assistant for awhile—a naked, incredibly attractive young man with a dead rabbit strung across his back. So, yeah, Robert has some images I really love, but on the whole I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of his work.
Do you have a favorite shot in the show?
There’s a portrait of Patti where you can see that her eyes are badly aligned, that she’s walleyed. I always loved that she could do that. One eye is going up and one is going down and she’s got her hands in front of her in kind of a Liz Taylor pose. I love it because I think it’s so funny.
Smith worked with you on the book, approving photos. Did she say no to anything?
Yes, she did veto some stuff. They were a little too personal. I thought they were important, but it seems that the book can survive without them.
This article appears in February 2014.
