Current Obsession: punk rocker Patti Smith pays tribute to her dead heroes in a new photo exhibition

By Rachel Heinrichs | February 7, 2013

By Rachel Heinrichs | 02/07/2013

By Rachel Heinrichs | Photographs courtesy Patti Smith and Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Current Obsession: trailblazing punk rocker Patti Smith pays tribute to her dead heroes in a new photo exhibition

When the New York singer-songwriter Patti Smith hit the American music scene in the mid-’70s, there was no one quite like her. She hacked her hair into a shaggy bob, wore men’s suits and flaunted her unshaven armpits on album covers. She achieved mainstream success early on with her hit “Because the Night”—still a staple on classic-rock radio—but she was always more about celebrating outsiderhood than being a typical rock star. Now 66, the doyenne of punk is undergoing an artistic renaissance: her 2010 memoir Just Kids won a National Book Award, she recently released her 11th album, Banga, and she’s mounting a new photography exhibit. Camera Solo, making its first Canadian appearance at the AGO this month, was partly born out of grief. Following the 1994 death of her husband, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, Patti found herself too devastated to write or play music, and so picked up a vintage Polaroid camera and started shooting mementos of her artistic idols. The mundane objects in Smith’s photos—Virginia Woolf’s cane, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers—hold a kind of talismanic magic. You can almost hear her gravelly voice whispering, “That very fork was used by Arthur Rimbaud.” Her unfettered reverence is contagious: you can’t help but look at her Polaroid Land 250 (pictured above), which also appears in the show, and think, “That very camera was used by Patti Smith.”

ART
Patti Smith: Camera Solo
Art Gallery of Ontario
Feb. 9 to May 19

SHOW CAPTION

RETURN TO ARTICLE

Current Obsession: punk rocker Patti Smith pays tribute to her dead heroes in a new photo exhibition

The Latest

Editor’s Letter: The twisty tale of a crooked cop

Everything there is to eat and drink at Table Fare and Social, a new food hall and patio at CIBC Square

Cottage of the Week: $1.6 million for a 113-year-old Prince Edward County farmhouse that tripled its price in two years

The Inside Job: A crooked cop, a dead man and an $800,000 estate fraud

What’s on the menu at Savor, a 4,000-square-foot Thai restaurant in Corso Italia with an Iron Chef in the kitchen

Condo of the Week: $1.5 million for a Riverside loft in an old factory with a view of the skyline