A pair of slippers. A poet’s utensils. Small objects that might barely register until you know whose they were.
Among Patti Smith’s photographic subjects are Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers and Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils. These images, included in her exhibition Camera Solo, turn personal belongings into intimate portraits of absent people. Their tight framing gives ordinary things room to hold our attention.
Smith brings a particular familiarity to her tools. Speaking to Vogue in 2011, she described using a Polaroid Land 250 from 1967, learning the light it responded to and taking it around the world. “It has been my friend,” she said. Making a photograph she loved could give a day in an unfamiliar town its own small sense of achievement.
There is something useful in that modest ambition. A creative practice can offer the satisfaction of having noticed something and having made a record of it.
Smith’s choice of subjects also makes her photographs distinctly hers. Literature, friendship and memory shape where she points the camera. Looking at these objects becomes a way of following her interests, discovering the people and histories she carries with her.
The photographs have had a public life. Camera Solo travelled to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2013, where her Polaroid images were presented as gelatin silver prints alongside personal objects. Calling the practice simply a hobby would overlook its place in her wider artistic work.
Yet its appeal remains accessible. For anyone accustomed to making things to a brief, Smith’s photographs suggest the value of letting personal fascination choose the subject.
Pick something because it matters to you. Learn what your tools can do. Stay with an interest long enough to see what someone else might pass by.
A pair of slippers can be enough.
