DETROIT, MI.- The Detroit Institute of Arts hosts the exhibition Patti Smith: Camera Solo, which comprises more than 60 black-and-white gelatin silver prints taken with her vintage Polaroid camera. The exhibition is on view June 1–Sept. 2, and is free with museum admission.
Pioneering musician, poet, author and artist Smith has made her mark on the American cultural landscape throughout her 40-year career, from her explorations of artistic expression with friend and vanguard photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1960s and 70s to her profound influence on the nascent punk rock scene in the late 1970s and 80s.
Patti Smith: Camera Solo explores themes that are significant to Smith: poets and writers; portraiture, including symbolic portraits; travel; and art and architecture. Smith’s photographs highlight the rich relationships between art, architecture, poetry and the everyday. Her titles reference varied muses, such as Roberto Bolaño’s Chair, Herman Hesse’s Typewriter and My Father’s Cup. Such objects are tightly cropped and detached from their surroundings; divorced from their original function, they become devotional images.
“These intimate photographs provide a fascinating look at the world as seen through Patti Smith’s eyes,” said Graham W.J. Beal, DIA director. “Both longtime fans and people newly exposed to her work will be impressed by her truly touching commemoration of the artists, poets, authors, family and friends from whom she draws inspiration.”
Smith began taking 35 mm photographs in 1968 as components for collages and took up the serious use of the Polaroid Land Camera in 1995. Her photos are infused with personal significance and possess the same unfiltered, emotional quality prevalent in her poetry and song lyrics. The allure of her photographs is their often dreamlike imagery, and their modest size belies their depth and power.
Smith’s use of a vintage Polaroid Land 250 camera lends intimacy to her images, whether casual, unvarnished portraits of herself and her children, or symbolic portraits such as Mapplethorpe’s slippers. In the era of digital imaging and manipulation, Smith’s works champion the use of photography in its most classical sense: as a tool to document a “found” moment. She finds the poetic qualities of a particular time and place, and captures that beauty on film.
