Lynn Goldsmith on the Music She Photographed During the 1970s

Somewhere in Texas one evening during the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in 1978, photographer Lynn Goldsmith witnessed the band trying to cope with the sweltering heat outside after a show and saw the perfect opportunity to capture something special. Noticing a nearby fountain that was on, she told Springsteen and late E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons to jump into the sprinklers to cool off.

There, Clemons, dressed in shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, Springsteen in jeans and a red T-shirt, and water splashing in front of their smiling faces, a reflection of Goldsmith’s more intimate connection to some of the artists she’s photographed throughout her 50-plus-year career, and on display at her recent Music in the ’70s exhibit at Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York City.

“It was after a show, and it was really hot outside,” remembers Goldsmith, who was also dating Springsteen at the time. “We stopped to go somewhere to eat, and they had that fountain outside. So, it’s more a matter of you see something, and you want to make a picture, and you say, ‘Get in the fountain.’ They weren’t in the fountain, and then I captured it. They did as I commanded.”

Most of Goldsmith’s photographs on display reflect different bonds to artists, including a more militant photo of her longtime friend and muse, Patti Smith. Taken in 1977, Smith, in army-green pants and a belt of bullets around her waist, stands with the words “Pasolini et vie” (“Pasolini and life”) graffited in red on a yellow board behind her. The photograph was a nod to Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a symbol of Smith’s own recovery and creative rebirth around the release of her Easter album, following a serious neck injury.

The exhibit also spotlights Goldsmith’s photographs of Muhammad Ali, Tom Petty, Tina Turner, Hunter S. Thompson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen, among others.

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“It’s different with different people,” says Goldsmith, pointing to a black and white photograph of The Runaways’ Joan Jett and Lita Ford from nearly 50 years earlier, during one of the band’s performances at CBGB in 1976. The lighting was low inside the venue, so Goldsmith said getting a shot was more about relying on her proficiency with a camera than connecting with an artist or “setting a scene.”

“When it’s a photograph during a concert, it has nothing to do with hanging out with the people,” says Goldsmith, who also added a still life to exhibit with a 1971 shot of Elton John’s psychedelic platform shoes. “It has to do with your own eye and your technical abilities, especially in those days, because a lot of places like CBGB had no lighting.”

Goldsmith continues, “It was a matter of being able, technically, to capture things that today are so much easier because your camera on auto focus and high ISOs, when you can work in no light whatsoever, and with your phone.”

Other moments had less to do with planning and more to do with being present, like her fly-on-the-wall shot of Rod Stewart playing pool or a candid show of Tom Petty holding a bottle of Jack Daniels backstage and in the studio during the late ’70s.

“You have to get that comfort level when it’s an intimate shot like that,” says Goldsmith. “It’s more macro.”

The photographer’s connection with artists also stretched behind a different camera as a director of ABC’s In Concert series during the early 1970s, and on page when Goldsmith, under the pseudonym Will Powers, co-wrote songs with Nile Rodgers, Sting, Steve Winwood, Robert Palmer, and Todd Rundgren for her 1983 album Dancing for Mental Health.

Though the exhibit is a snapshot into Goldsmith’s work during the ’70s, the photographer, who released her book Music in the ’80s in 2022, says she doesn’t generally think of her work in terms of decades, and she’s still attached to the more traditional “rhythm” of taking images and deciding what makes the cut later rather than shooting and deciding on the spot.

“I like that aspect of photography more,” she says. “You get in a rhythm, and things happen, and then later on you can decide if you like them or not. It’s not about stopping and looking at each image.”

The exhibit also follows the release of Goldsmith’s most recent photography book, Before Easter After, chronicling her journey throughout the decades with Smith.

“I always learn something when I do a book,” says Goldsmith, who jokes that he is also involved in looking up a lot of dates for accuracy. “It gives me a sense of something that I wasn’t really aware of until I worked on them as a group,” she adds. “It’s like ‘Wow, was I really at a place called Cain’s Ballroom in Oklahoma? ‘”

See Lynn Goldsmith’s full collection at the Morrison Hotel Gallery here.

Photo: Lynn Goldsmith photographing Bruce Springsteen; All photos by Lynn Goldsmith