swintons:

Patti Smith’s photographs are an elegy to the dead, memento mori of her heroes’ worldly effects.

The pictures have a haunting, haunted quality that recalls the early history of the medium, when photography was new and strange and seemed to offer not only a means of recording the world but also a window into its mysteries.

The photographs in the Hartford show — black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus — are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.

[More photos]

(Source: mizoguchi, via iamjapanese)