Lynn Goldsmith. Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

The book is heavy in the way TASCHEN music monographs tend to be, oversized and printed to make grain look like a decision rather than a limitation. Lynn Goldsmith's Springsteen photographs get room to breathe here, blown up to a scale that suits the arena-sized myth and the small, deliberate human being at the center of it.

Goldsmith photographed Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band across the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the years the band climbed from clubs to stadiums. She had the kind of access that only comes with proximity, professional and personal at once, and the pictures carry the ease of a photographer who was not being handled by a publicist.

These were the pivotal years, the stretch from Born to Run through Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, when the live show became the argument for the band's greatness. Goldsmith caught the transition in the bodies: the lean, hungry stage animal of the late 1970s slowly becoming the endurance athlete of the stadium era. The players around him get their due too, Clarence Clemons and the rest photographed as the working unit they were and not as a backdrop for the star.

The onstage frames do their job, sweat and spotlight and the choreography of a band that treated a show as physical labor. But the quieter pictures are the ones that hold. Springsteen backstage, in a car, mid-thought between commitments, looking like a man doing a job rather than a legend receiving tribute.

Part of that ease has a complicated source. Goldsmith and Springsteen were involved for a stretch of these years, and the closeness cuts both ways in the pictures, granting an intimacy few photographers ever reach and raising the old problem of where affection ends and documentation begins. She has been candid about the tangle since, including the night in 1979 when he pulled her onstage at a No Nukes benefit in front of a full house. The work does not hide the closeness. It runs on it.

Goldsmith shoots available light more often than not, and she trusts a moment over a setup. The black-and-white frames lean on contrast and timing; the color work catches the particular tungsten grime of backstage America. Nothing is overdesigned. The photographs assume the music will do the amplifying.

The strongest single images tend to be the least composed. A tired face in a dressing-room mirror, a huddle at the wing of the stage, the band folded into a car at four in the morning between cities. Goldsmith knew when not to raise the camera and when the ordinary moment was the one worth keeping, and that restraint is what separates the work from routine tour coverage.

How much the collection moves you depends partly on what the E Street mythology already means. A newcomer will admire the craft and feel less of the gravity; a believer will find it close to indispensable. Read beside her Patti Smith book, Before Easter After, it confirms Goldsmith's real subject, which was never celebrity but the working musician caught in the gap between the noise and the quiet.

What it finally documents is not stardom but the labor underneath it: the load-in, the dead hours, the long stretches of ordinary that wrap around three hours of noise. Goldsmith was there for all of it, and she gave the boredom the same attention she gave the roar; that evenness is the record's real achievement.