Known primarily as a musician and writer — of both poetry and the memoir "Just Kids" — Patti Smith is also a prolific photographer. Opening on October 21 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the exhibition "Patti Smith: Camera Solo," curated by Susan Talbott, comprises some 60 of her photographs plus two multimedia installations. Isaac Kaplan spoke with Smith at Electric Lady Studios, in New York, where she was recording an album.

One of your installations contains a reproduction of the litter on which Arthur Rimbaud was carried.

There are two, a black one and a natural-wood one. They're reproductions to scale of the one that Rimbaud was carried on up and down the Ethiopian mountains for about two hundred miles when he had gangrene of the leg and was in mortal agony. He actually drew a sketch of a litter for the Ethiopian bearers to build, and that sketch has survived. I had a litter fashioned after the sketch. I imagined Rimbaud lying on this litter in the pelting rain, in the sweltering heat, in terrible pain, his mind feverish; imagined him returning to a more poetic consciousness, so I wanted to cover the litters with his language, his letters, his poems. The light one represents his youth and is covered with his poetry in French and English. The dark one represents the end of his life, and on that I used gold and bronze and copper pencils to copy his last missives before he died. One was a telegram [sent from his sickbed in France] asking when the next ship would be leaving to go back to Abyssinia, because he wanted to return to Africa. He died the next day. He was semidelirious when he dictated it.

Many of the subjects of the photos in the show are literary: Virginia Woolf's bed, the poet John Keats's bed.
 
At the end of Woolf's life, her husband built her a separate room, almost like a shed, attached to the house — very humble, with a single bed in it — because I think she had a lot of terrible migraines and probably just wanted to be alone. We spend half our life in bed, it seems: giving birth, making love, sleeping, sick. So beds are always interesting to me. Some are very anonymous, and some have a lot of personality. I took a photograph of my friend, the poet Jim Carroll's bed days after he died, and the sadness of the end of his life seemed totally incorporated into his bed linens and his pillow. I’ve always loved books, loved them so much that I loved the people who wrote them for me. I loved J.M. Barrie for giving me Peter Pan, Louisa May Alcott or giving me Little Women, Herman Melville for giving me Moby Dick, Roberto Bolaño for 2666. And I've lost so many people in my life: my husband, my brother, my pianist. Robert Mapplethorpe, who was my best friend. I've lost my parents. Remembering the dead is part of my life.

Do you view photography as a way to save a moment, defend against loss?

There's truth in that. I started taking Polaroids very seriously after the death of my husband and brother at the end of 1994, and I think it was because of my sorrow and weariness and having two children to raise in this atmosphere of loss. I found it very difficult to do anything, to draw, to write — anything other than the minimum I had to do to be a good mother, just to get by. I had an old Polaroid camera,and I took a photograph of Rudolf Nureyev's slippers; I have a pair of his practice slippers. I liked the photograph. It gave me pleasure because I could see it immediately, and the immediate gratification gave me a sense of accomplishment. I think for a while I took the pictures because, unable to do anything else, I felt that sense of accomplishment. And then I became hooked. When I wasn’t able to do other things, that was helpful. Also, when I'm touring with my band, with anywhere from seven to nine fellas — and rock and roll, even though we’re a really simple, old-fashioned band, is still technical, a lot of technology, and a collaborative effort — taking the photographs gives me a little time on my own, not having to collaborate, not having to depend on any technical things. It's just me and the camera. When Robert took photographs, he really wanted to do something that no one else had done, something revolutionary. That's not my intent. If I'm compared to a 19th-century amateur, I'm happy. When I was very young I loved the Victorian photographers, like Julia Margaret Cameron, and then the French photographers Félix Nadar, Etienne Carjat, and later Eugène Atget. I was taking pictures really long before Robert but not with the goal of being an artist or photographer. Robert was more formal, more classical, more technical, and certainly more pure in the way he took a photograph. Robert didn't take snapshots. He wasn’t a person who went out into the world with a camera.

Do you approach taking a picture of a person differently from taking one of an object?

I don't take that many pictures of people. When I do, I tend to take them very quickly. It's all about light. But I like the solitude of taking pictures, so I photograph a lot of statues. Sometimes you get them in a certain light and they have such a human quality. I've fallen in love with many a statue.

Click on the photo gallery at left to see images from "Patti Smith: Camera Solo," at Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, through February 19, 2012.