Patti Smith
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I was so hard on myself about every little thing or every, you know, imperfection.
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He took the photograph, perhaps the most famous photograph of you that was on the cover of your album, Horses, I think in 1975, in which you're wearing a kind of oversized white shirt and an undone tie with like a suit jacket slung over your shoulder.
Tell us how that photograph came about.
Well, we wanted to take the cover and Robert knew where he wanted to take it.
It was up in Sam Wagstaff's apartment on
in New York City, which was a very white room and there was a triangle of light that used to come through a window and he was extremely interested in photographing that triangle.
And we went up there and I remember the light started changing and he wanted us to hurry up and we had to run.
We couldn't get a cab and we had to run as fast as we could because he could really feel the light changing.
And in terms of my clothing, it was just my usual clothes.
I used to like, I really wanted to have a Baudelairean type of look.
I wanted a black and white sort of a mixture of just how I was and a little 19th century feel in it.
But in the end, the final photograph
which some people have made quite a bit of the particular pose or stance in the photograph, was really a tribute to Frank Sinatra.
Well, no, actually, he did a movie, I think it was called, oh man, I don't think it was Pal Joey.