During the media preview for her show of photographs at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Patti Smith spoke of her most enduring memory of the 14 or so years she lived in suburban St. Clair Shores, just northeast of Detroit. She was taking her young son and daughter for a morning walk on a crisp autumn day. The sun was shining, the sky was clear, the birds chirping. The two children walked ahead holding hands, silhouetted by the light. She remembers thinking, “This is a perfect moment and soon it will be gone.” That statement is an apt description of the nature of photography and some key ideas in “Patti Smith: Camera Solo.”
The first traveling museum exhibition of Smith’s photography, the show features some 60 black-and-white images, the majority taken with a vintage Polaroid Land 250 camera. The exhibition also contains a number of personal artifacts, several of which appear in the photographs.
A large segment of the exhibition is devoted to artists and their creative surroundings. There’s a photograph of Roberto Bolano’s writing chair and another of Herman Hesse‘s typewriter. There’s an image of a jar of Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant’s paintbrushes. A large section is devoted to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, including several shots from the museum dedicated to him in Charleville-Mezieres in northern France. Another image shows a view of the River Ouse taken from the bridge under which Virginia Woolf‘s body was retrieved three weeks after she had drowned herself in March 1941. In a display case next to the photograph is a rounded rock Smith collected from the river similar to those Woolf filled her pockets with to prevent herself from floating and ensure the success of her second attempt at suicide. There is of course a section devoted to Robert Mapplethorpe, whose deep relationship with Smith is chronicled in Just Kids.
In his 1927 essay “Photography,” Siegfried Kracauer compares the medium with what he terms the “memory-image,” . . .