Lynn Goldsmith Issue #34

The rock photographer is as iconic as the musicians she’s shot for 30 years

By Daphne Carr
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 1:37pm

What is the difference between a musician and a celebrity? Lynn Goldsmith says both come in different sizes and shapes and is sometimes awkward, tired, and unenthused. But the most important thing about a musician is that she or he possesses in their fingers and voices something that is supposed to show up on their faces and bodies.

As Goldsmith helped musicians get ready for the camera, her lens would capture photographs that would eventually show up in Rolling Stone, Interview, Time, Newsweek, Elle, Sports Illustrated, and Life. “I was very involved,” she says. “I did hair and make-up, I did the style. I liked changing artists to reach their full potential. I cut Ricky Nelson’s hair. I changed artist’s clothing and then would go home and throw all their old clothes away.”

Somehow in these sessions the musicians would find themselves, and she them, through the subtle manipulation of gesture, expression, light, and background until all aligned to tell the musician’s story. Goldsmith’s photos of rock’s golden era are iconic: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa, Annie Lennox, Bob Marley, George Clinton, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Patti Smith. Now, with 30 years of these magic moments committed to film, Goldsmith has released a book of rock shots called Rock and Roll and a related exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is something of a closure for her.

Starting in the late ’60s, Goldsmith shot musicians whose increasingly large profiles made them into celebrities and icons. She witnessed her college friend, James Osterberg, and her one-time boyfriend Bruce Springsteen transform from regular guys into objects of a generation’s rocknroll fantasies: Godfather of Punk and The Boss. Likewise, her own career trajectory took her higher up the ranks of iconicity. In 1997, she had her fill of it all and sold her photography business. “I felt like a whore. I was doing something I loved, but I wasn’t loving it, and I was getting money for it,” she says. “There was starting to be all this machinery around the shoot — people who were not art directors. There were all these publicists.”

Iggy Pop mentions this in his introduction to Goldsmith’s Rock book — the shift in the ’90s toward an overtly aesthetic presence when the look in the ’70s and ’80s was less glamour-centric and more substantial, authentic. “What I liked about that statement is what he said about people then — it was possible to capture something about them then that you can’t now because of all the hair and make-up people. There’s always spontaneity in a shoot, sure, but like Jennifer Lopez, 25 years ago she wouldn’t have looked like that in a photograph.”

Although listed among the “greats” of rock photography, Goldsmith never defined herself solely by this outlet for her creativity. “Annie Leibowitz is focused on photography,” she says. “She is known throughout the world for her photos. For me, photography is the one thing I’ve done continuously since childhood. It’s just not me to do only one thing.” Since 1997, Goldsmith been working on fine art self-portraits in the manner of artist Cindy Sherman.

Goldsmith was born in Michigan and moved to New York City in the early ’70s. In 1972 she directed ABC’s In Concert, the first rock concert show on network television. While she’s had her share of unwanted advances in the rock industry, it was in television that Goldsmith said she found the most sexism. “All the cameramen were 50, and I was 20, and I’m 5-foot-five,” Goldsmith says. “No one took me seriously, so I bought platforms and wore long bellbottoms, so I looked about 5-foot-9. I got tired of walking that way. I felt like I was in KISS.”

By 1976 Goldsmith had started LGI, one of the first professional photography companies to specialize in editorial shoots. She soon found herself drawn to shooting rock musicians, whom she has called “the bodies that carry the songs to us. These are the messengers, chosen by us to play out our passions.” Like the musicians she shot, Goldsmith got stage fright before going to work. “When I did a shoot I would go into a room along and not want to shoot. Then when it started there was nothing more in the world I wanted to do. It was ritual that never changed.”

In the early ’80s, Goldsmith recorded her own album under the name Will Powers. It was cheeky, therapeutic, and rendered genderless — as the moniker suggests — by a vocoder in the style of Lori Anderson’s work from the same era. The music recalls the Tom Tom Club’s early ’80s blend of art school and hip-hop collaging and beats. Goldsmith says she had been writing songs for a while, but didn’t want to do something mediocre. “I didn’t want to write another pained love song or a song about cars,” she says. “Being from the Motor City, I loved James Brown and used his beats plus my voice, sort of not male or female. What I said was true, but it was silly and it made people dance. You can’t dance and be depressed — that’s why the album is called Music for Mental Health. ” In on the joke were guest musicians Sting, Steve Winwood, Tom Bailey, Nile Rodgers, and Todd Rundgren and had two great singles, “Adventures In Success” and “Kissing With Confidence.”

Joking aside, Goldsmith sees a relationship between her rock photography, recording career, and her self-portraits: an exploration of unfixed identity. As a television producer, rock photographer, avant-garde pop musician, and fine artist, Goldsmith still maintains a blog and lives according to the laws of success laid out by her alter ego Will Powers. “First law of success,” according to Powers, “Take inventory of your assets. Second: write a description of the person you'd like to be. Third: concentrate on a mental image of the person you'd like to be. Paint a picture in your imagination of who you want to become.”

By adding subtle extras (like a crown of rubber snakes to the head of Frank Zappa) or subtracting (like her shots of the Beatles’s feet), Goldsmith has focused on those parts of the pop being that become larger than life. These are the still shots that signify, the images that document or even make icons out of everyday people. Goldsmith’s images are of an era of those incredible creatures — gone as they may be from the present moment — and well worth remembering through her loving and steady gaze.