![]() A famously light packer (a fact she illustrates here and here), she liked having the camera on the road because it gave her motivation to leave the venue or the hotel. Later, she took the Polaroid on tour as she returned to public life as a performer. Taking Polaroids because it’s so simple, immediate, gave me an immediate response to my creative needs, it was helpful to me to restore my confidence as an artist at a very difficult time.” “I felt so weary,” she told Reuters in 2008 on the occasion of the first exhibit of her images at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. The image on the cover features Smith holding her beloved but retired Polaroid Land 250 camera, the one that launched her foray into photography that began after the unexpected death of her husband, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, in 1995. ![]() But it’s not an export of her Instagram the entries in the book are more polished. Smith reads it all, even if she doesn’t respond.Ī Book of Days is a collection of images and texts presented in a smaller-than-standard-size book, a nod to the small, square (or rectangular) frame of Instagram and Polaroid images. These days, fans can comment on her Instagram posts. These outlets existed because Smith (and her guitarist Lenny Kaye) were themselves enormous rock-and-roll fans, so they knew how much it would mean to the kids in the crowd to have a direct connection. box (handled by none other than Patti’s mom, Beverly) and a fan club that put out a zine were listed in album liner notes. If fans couldn’t get to a concert, both the official fan club’s P.O. In the early days of her groundbreaking punk band the Patti Smith Group, there were moments at a reading or a concert where she’d break into conversation with the audience not just responding to the types of “We love you” or “Play ‘Free Money’” types of yelps but actual discussions where she asked what people were listening to or admonished them to drink hot tea after being caught in the rain. She recognized that it was another way to communicate directly with her fans, which is something she has always done in one form or another. But once there, she embraced the routine, regularly posting the same kinds of everyday things the rest of us put on our main feed: photos of her cat, her backyard in the snow, her children smiling, endless cups of coffee, lunches with friends, artifacts around her house. Smith explains in the book’s first entry that the primary reason she joined Instagram was to counter the fake Patti Smiths that were running amok on the service. It was only logical, then, to package so much of what is delightful about that digital presence into an analog format with the exquisitely curated A Book of Days, her recently released collection of 366 images, one for each day of the year (including a leap day), accompanied by concise, elegant captions. Her Instagram is a lyric poem writ digitally, and she intuitively figured out how to compellingly work in that new medium. ![]() A post shared by This is Patti Smith could have become an account that provided a pleasant but unremarkable series of tour images instead evolved into a new outlet for Smith’s ongoing relationship with her audience. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |