Photos by punk rocker Patti Smith at New Orleans Museum of Art
By Doug MacCash, The Times-Picayune
May 21, 2010, 5:00AM
Courtey of the New Orleans Museum of Art
Pattti Smith self-portrait.
On April 22, a flood of fans poured into the New Orleans Museum of Art for the debut of “Patti Smith: A Donation to NOMA,” an exhibit of 45 dark, dreamy photographs taken by the punk rock diva. The 213-seat museum theater where Smith was to speak about her camera work filled to capacity. An equal number of attendees settled in temporary seats in the museum lobby to watch her lecture by television monitor.
In boots and jeans, with long rivulets of hair curtaining her sharp features, Smith seemed unexpectedly soft-spoken and shy to those of us who knew her for the tell-it-like-it-is-and-take-no-prisoners intensity of her 1970s songs. Just listen to her angsty rendition of “Because the Night” or her nihilistic cover of “Gloria,” or her manic recitation of “Land.” On those recordings and others Smith is utterly articulate. Her lyrics vibrate with alienation and anger.
At the NOMA podium she seemed a touch tongue-tied, and charmingly self-effacing.
Steven Forster / The Times-Picayune
New Orleans Museum of Art director John Bullard, rocker/photographer Patti Smith and NOMA photography curator Diego Cortez pose at the opening of Smith’s photo exhibit at the museum.
She told the crowd that her earliest photographic epiphany may have been when she realized the Irving Penn fashion shots in Vogue magazine were somehow more compelling than those in the Sears catalog. She said she’s always loved Charles “Lewis Carroll” Dodgson’s eerie photographs of the real-life Alice. She’s transported by the romantic street scenes of Eugène Atget. And she deeply admires the way Alfred Stieglitz captured Georgia O’Keeffe’s strong, expressive hands in portraits.
She said that she was inspired by those Stieglitz-O’Keeffe portraits when she posed for photos by her close friend, the legendary Robert Mapplethorpe.
The defiant-yet-alluring jacket-over-the-shoulder pose on the cover of her 1975 “Horses” album is probably the best known of Mapplethorpe’s portraits of Smith.
On the day of the shoot, she recalled for the captivated audience, Mapplethorpe declined to share the anchovy sandwich she’d prepared. He was worried about capturing the subtle triangle of light on the edge of the shot. After the lecture Smith signed copies of “Just Kids,” her memoir that chronicles her friendship with the master photographer, who died of AIDS in 1989.
Courtesy the New Orleans Museum of Art
Patti Smith’s photo of Walt Whitman’s Tomb in Camden, N.J., 2006. Gelatin silver print from Polaroid Land 250
Smith’s photography was born of sadness. She said she took up the camera when her husband, fellow punk rocker Fred Smith, died in 1994. She didn’t have the will to write songs or poems at the time, but her old-fashioned Polaroid allowed her to remain creative.
“You can take a photograph, you can look at it look at it and say, ‘I did good, I did a piece of work today,’ ” she said in a later interview. Smith says she’s not very technically savvy, so the simple Polaroid (made in the late 1960s) that captures nothing more than “light/dark and near/far” appeals to her.
“It’s the same camera Robert Mapplethorpe started with,” she said. “That’s what I like. That’s what I want. I know that you can in some ways get a better picture with a cell phone, in terms of clarity or detail.”
Courtest the New Orleans Museum of Art
Patti Smith’s Tulips, 2003. Gelatin silver print from Polaroid Land 250.
Smith rewarded the NOMA crowd by playing a song on the acoustic guitar at the middle and end of her lecture. She dedicated a song called “Grateful” to her fans watching the television monitors in the lobby.
“I hope you all took notes of my extraordinarily insightful words,” she said with a chuckle at the end of her lecture. Then everyone filed up the marble staircase to study her series of small, shadowy snapshots of literary artifacts, historic sites, and other resonant odds and ends: a Jack Kerouac manuscript, William Burrough’s bandanna, Arthur Rinbaud’s geography book, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, Walt Whitman’s tomb, a rare Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painting of Christ, a forlorn cross on a beach, a photo of Smith’s adult son reclining on a couch, and a glinting statue of Joan of Arc in France, similar to the one on North Peters Street in the Quarter.
Smith says she hopes her photos have the atmosphere of 19th century photos that she sometimes runs across in Parisian flea markets. She does not consider herself a professional photographer.
“I am an amateur photographer, and I am an amateur guitar player,” she said before one of her songs. She prefers, she said, to think of photography as her hobby, “using the word ‘hobby’ in its highest form.”
Courtesy the New Orleans Museum of Art
Patti Smith's portrait of actor Ralph Fiennes
Those of us who are fond of primitive camera effects are drawn to Smith’s moody photos for their intimacy and imprecision.
“The atmosphere of the Polaroid is very special,” she said. The mysterious light leaks and other accidents give the impression that “the camera has a spirit of its own.”
“This fascinates me,” she said.
Smith said she hoards obsolete Polaroid film so she can continue taking her fascinating flawed photos for as long as possible. In most cases, the prints on display at NOMA were made from negatives created from the original one-of-a-kind Polaroid photos.
Smith took her brand of angst-ridden rock to Tipitina’s two nights after her museum lecture. In the meantime she snapped a few New Orleans photos: the stairway leading to William Faulkner’s apartment, a plaster angel in Satsuma Cafe, and our statue of St. Joan.
Patti Smith: A Donation to NOMA
What: 45 photographs by the renowned rock star.
Where: The New Orleans Museum of Art, 1 Collins Diboll Circle, City Park, 658.4100.
When: Wednesday, noon to 8 p.m.; Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m.-5., through July 3.
Admission: Wednesdays free. Admission for Louisiana residents on other days: adults, $8; seniors, $7; children 3 to 17, $4; children younger than 3, free. For out-of-state visitors: adults, $10; seniors, $9; children 3 to 17, $5; children 3 and younger, free.
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