Musician, poet, and author Patti Smith wears many artistic hats in her creative life, but perhaps the least known is her work as a photographer. While she had drawn and painted since her childhood, she did not take her first photographs until 1978, inspired by the work of her friend Robert Mapplethorpe.
In the catalogue for her 2011 exhibition Patti Smith: Camera Solo at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Susan Lubowsky Talbott describes Smith’s photographic practice:
‘Her photographs possess the same unfiltered emotional quality found in her poetry and lyrics. The images are totemic and somet.mes s elegiac, whether they serve as symbolic portraits or as memorials to the authors and artists she admires. . . These works are intimate--modest in scale like the pages of a book. Her tenderness for her subjects, both animate and inanimate, is apparent in every image.’
The 12 intimate prints presented here form a multi-part symbolic portrait of painter Frida Kahlo. Each one documents objects and architectural details in her Mexico City home, La Casa Azul, where she grew up and later lived with her husband, Diego Rivera. Smith photographed domestic details, such as a hand-embroidered pillow on Kahlo’s bed, as well as the artist’s distinctive personal effects, including her crutches, corset, and one of her traditional Tehuana dresses hanging on a dressmaker’s mannequin. Smith's reverence for Kahlo is deeply embedded in each image.
Discussing her process of visiting sites affiliated with her favorite writers and artists to document the relics of their lives, Smith has revealed:
‘When I’m on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world. These pictures, in their simplicity, offer that world. . . I like to imagine myself akin to the nineteenth-century amateur. Ultimately, my great hope is that people might obtain one and place it above their desk in a room of their own.’