Visual Diary, Autophotograpy: Memory and Haunting in Patti Smith’s Polaroids and in Social Media – A Book of Days (2022)

Abstract

Patti Smith (b.1946) american artist, writer, poet, musician, and visual artist has an exceptional photographic vision that affects all fields of her work. For Smith photography is not just a medium or a way of self expression, but rather a unique perspective, a narrative trope, the origo of storytelling. With her debut album Horses (1975) Smith became known worldwide, subverted the traditions of rock'n roll artist’s representationt, as well as the concept of female ideal of the 1970s from a radically new, critical point of view. Smith's eccentricity was noticed by many photographers, namely by Frank Stefanko, Lynn Goldsmith and Annie Leibovitz who  took many portraits of her. After the death of her husband, Fred 'Sonic' Smith, Patti Smith grabbed a Polaroid camera herself and turned from the object to the subject of photography. Smith’s photographic work can be evaluated primarily as an attempt to process grief, as an autonomous gesture. The photographic approach of seeing, the photo as an integral part of the narrative, appears in all her memoirs, which records and documents her travels, and the artifacts from those artists who played an important role in Smith’s own identity construction. In Smith's haunting photos the difference between the living and the dead, bodies and objects, absence and presence fades away. In my study, I attempt to describe the connection between Smith's photographic vision and approach to gender relations, the autobiographical and autophotographical self expression and the experience of trauma. I will examine how Patti Smith transposes this practice into social media and how this interface radically transforms the way we relate to memory and the objects of memory.