Lynn Goldsmith. Patti Smith. Before Easter After

By the late seventies Patti Smith was mid-transformation, from downtown poet in a borrowed man's shirt to a rock singer with a single climbing the charts. Lynn Goldsmith was in the room for most of it. The two were friends before they were photographer and subject, and this TASCHEN collection gathers the pictures Goldsmith made across that hinge, bracketing the 1978 album Easter that carried Because the Night onto the radio. Goldsmith would go on to photograph half the rock pantheon, and this is the body of work where friendship and access line up most completely.

Smith was already an icon in the downtown imagination, the Horses cover by Robert Mapplethorpe having fixed her androgynous stare in 1975. Goldsmith arrived at the moment that stare met the mainstream. The interesting question the collection quietly poses is what happens to a self-invented persona when a hit single hands it to millions of strangers who never read the poetry.

The arrangement makes its claim in three beats, stated right in the title: before the record, the record, and everything the record changed. It is a smart frame for a body of work, treating fame as an event with a clean before and after instead of a steady climb. It also flatters the pictures, letting slighter images borrow gravity from their place in the sequence. The quiet early frames gain meaning from the louder later ones, and the loud ones gain poignancy from the quiet.

Goldsmith is a portraitist first, and the strength here is access turned into intimacy without curdling into intrusion. She catches Smith mugging, brooding, laughing at the edge of a laugh, and the pictures never feel stolen because the trust is visible in them. The friendship is the lighting nobody could rent. The black-and-white work has the grain and contrast of the period, printed with enough shadow to keep the mood and never so much that the face disappears.

The strongest runs are the undramatic ones. Smith on a bed with a guitar, backstage in transit, caught mid-sentence with a cigarette. Goldsmith shoots her subject as a working person, not a monument, and the ordinariness is the flattery. None of it performs for the camera, which is most of the achievement. The camera is treated as another friend in the room. When the performance images do arrive they land harder for the contrast, the same face that slumped in a dressing room now thrown open to a crowd.

The honest caveat is that intimacy and significance are not the same. A good deal here is very fine rock photography of a very fine subject, and some of it sits closer to a shared scrapbook than a major statement. Access is not the same as authorship, and the collection mostly knows the difference. The collaboration extends past the shutter, the subject clearly a partner in how she is shown and not a target, which is a large part of the charm and also its ceiling. Whether that is a limit or the entire point depends on what a viewer wants from it.

Goldsmith knew her before the world did, and the pictures carry the ease of that head start. That ease is the thing you cannot fake, and it is most of what makes them worth the time. The famous portraits came later, from strangers with bigger lights. These came from a friend.