contactprojectjournal the space between us.

Patti Smith fans are nice. On the bus to bleak, windy Hartford, I notice others, fingering their copies of Just Kids, hyping themselves up for the ever-approaching Patti Smith exhibition, reception and performance. I shiver, probably both of out of anticipation and due to the premature chill of autumn turning to winter. I had chosen to wear a a skirt, perhaps in order to look nice for Patti, although I can think of few things she might care less about. The man next to me watches, and offers me his Burberry coat. “Really?” I ask. “Of course! The jacket is mostly keeping other people warm than myself anyway. Last night Martha Stewart wore it at the theatre”. Everything about Patti Smith invokes a special experience.

Susan Talbot, the Director of The Wadsworth Atheneum, walks us through Camera Solo, an exhibition of small, delicate polaroids, installations and one film about the French poet called “Equation Daumal”. I’ve seen some of them before, yet in combination with many others, the collection strangely enough, feels intimate. Talbot explains the title of the exhibition with the story of Patti’s trip to the Castello Longhi de Paolis di Fumone, the Italian castle where Pope Celestine V was imprisoned until his death. Patti, along with all other visitors, learned that no one was allowed to enter Pope Celestine’s Italian tradition of “camera solo”, meaning the “room of one’s own”. A space of one’s own—a perfect representation of what each small polaroid that Patti produces becomes. Again, spanning from her collection from the early ‘60s, many of the images are familiar, (for example, “Robert Mapplethorpe, 1968”, and “Robert’s Slippers, 2002”, both reproduced in Smith’s 2010 novel). Some depict well-known people: Jean-Luc Godard, William Blake, Ann Demulemeester, but even more are of Patti’s influences and objects that represent them in her eyes. Poet Roberto Bolano’s chair, which he brought to every home he owned, in order to write. Susan Sontag’s grave, covered in flowers, surveys the emptiness the world experiences without her presence as well as what she’s left behind, like the flowers on the ground. Arthur Rimbaud’s family atlas is photographed, only one piece in the large tribute Patti makes to him. An entire room was devoted him, “Un Season En Enfer”: a season in hell. In this room, Patti placed an installation of the his litter, the wooden and netted structure (similar to a modern day stretcher) which carried his sick body through Africa in the 1800’s. Patti explains this to us, when she walks in the room, seeming to be a shadow of the space looming around her that we all try to fill—every year on Rimbaud’s birthday, she celebrates in various ways. He is, after all, her spiritual lover. This year, her commemoration is the opening of the Camera Solo exhibition. We’ve been invited to celebrate with her.

Susan Talbot mentions that she finds the theme of “symbolic portraits” to be very resonant in Patti’s work. Not entirely sure how to place this, I dwell on it until later, when I read her interview with Patti Smith (that’s being archived in in the museum). Of her subjects, Patti says, “I guess I have a bit of a Catholic sensibility in the way that the relic has true meaning for me. A devotee may treasure a fragment of Saint Bernadette’s mantle in a locket. I can understand that, I’ve always been talismanic.” In the interview they also come to the conclusion that the objects she photographs are a way of understanding those that she’s lost: “Their objects were the only way I could invoke them.”

More religious imagery is present in the photos of cherub statues from the Montparnasse Cemetary in Paris. Patti mentions her fondness for these, and I agree. The photograph brings the characters to life. The photo of Virginia Woolf’s bed is especially eerie, The cross made by the fold in the sheet, perpendicular to the line made by embroidery is very ominous. We hear a story of how Patti held telepathic commune with Virginia Woolf in order to create the photo she desired, and, happy with the results, Patti shares the photo with the world. Talbot also notes that these photos are not the original polaroids, only a silver gelatin print that she produces with a 19th century technique. The rest remain in Patti’s private collection.