AFTER THE FALL
With Before Easter After, photographer Lynn Goldsmith and her subject Patti Smith share a half century of moments both intimate and iconic.
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Like a rock ’n’ roll Thelma and Louise, but with a different ending, Patti Smith and photographer Lynn Goldsmith have been pals for more than 50 years. Both cool, exotic, accomplished, and driven, you’d think because they occupied such similar psychic space they might avoid each other—like two magnets repelling when like poles are placed together—never mind becoming friends. But instead they forged an enduring bond and together caused artistic havoc and made mere mortals nervous around them. When they flounced into a room together, molecules seemed to move a little faster, and the air became charged with possibilities. Putting their big minds together, an even bigger genius emerged: Sparks would fly, worlds would be remade, and some of the most memorable and haunting photos of Smith would be taken. Why were they so special? Because unlike other photographers who made the singer look transgressive and haunted, Goldsmith made her look beautiful.
“It’s how I saw her. I’m in the business of iconography,” says Goldsmith. “It was interesting to me that in [Robert Mappelthorpe’s] photographs [on the cover of Horses] or Judy Linn’s photographs [on the cover of Radio Ethiopia], it’s how they saw Patti. She didn’t look like that to me. It’s kind of the magic of photography that you have all these people aiming the camera at the same person and that person will somehow look different.”
Like the cover of the Patti Smith Group's third album, 1978’s Easter, where she looks like an earth nymph, her skin as pale as the moon, her face inscrutable and mysterious, with the shadow of subversive underarm hair, which her label tried to get her to airbrush out. She stood firm.
Easter signaled a kind of resurrection—physically, emotionally, and commercially—for Smith after she lost her balance on a Tampa stage on Jan. 23, 1977, and fell into a concrete orchestra pit. She was carried out with a gash in her head that required 22 stitches and two broken vertebrae and a number of facial bones, leading to much-needed bed rest and rigorous physical therapy. All this is documented in Goldsmith’s new book Before Easter After, which covers the period from 1976 to 1979. It documents not only Smith’s emergence as a world-class artist, but the small moments along the way: the singer in a phone booth, a luminous look on her angular face as she calls MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, whom she would eventually marry. As for Goldsmith and Smith, who are doing a series of events around the book, they’re still the best of friends. The last time Goldsmith shot the musician? “Last week.”
