Lynn Goldsmith. Patti Smith. Before Easter After. Art Edition No. 101–200, ‘NYC, 1976’

Somewhere between a friendship and a working arrangement, Lynn Goldsmith and Patti Smith made the photographs gathered here, and the ambiguity of that somewhere is exactly why they hold up. Goldsmith had access across the years that bracket Easter, the 1978 record that carried Smith deepest into a mainstream she never fully trusted, the kind of access no hired shooter is ever handed. What complicates the recommendation has nothing to do with the pictures and everything to do with the object they have been poured into.

This is the Art Edition, numbered 101 to 200, sold with a signed print titled NYC, 1976 and priced to match. The standard edition of Before Easter After carries substantially the same photographs for a small fraction of the outlay. So the question a studio owner has to settle is narrow: is this a body of work to study, or an artwork to own?

As study material the photographs earn their reputation. Goldsmith catches Smith in the registers she is known for and several she is not: the androgynous stage animal mid-howl, the reader hunched over a notebook, the friend laughing with her guard all the way down, the icon assembling herself in a mirror. The intimacy is the achievement, and it comes from years rather than from one lucky session.

The period is part of the pull. These are the years of a downtown New York that no longer exists, when a poet could turn into a rock singer without anyone deciding which she was, and Goldsmith photographs Smith right at the hinge of that change.

What lifts this above the ordinary rock archive is that photographer and subject were building the images together. Smith performs for the lens and also through it, using Goldsmith the way she used a stage, and Goldsmith lets that collaboration show instead of pretending to catch a private moment unawares. Goldsmith's wider catalogue of music portraiture, the Springsteen and E Street Band pictures among it, proves she can work fast with a near-stranger; the Smith photographs show what she does with someone she knows completely. It is portraiture as a two-person act, both people visibly at work.

None of which softens the format problem. A numbered edition built around a collector's print is made to be shelved, insured, and admired, not thumbed through on a light table the night before a shoot. For the photographer who wants the lesson instead of the asset, the standard edition delivers nearly everything these pictures have to teach, minus the print and the premium.

Which returns to that somewhere between friendship and work. The photographs reward the encounter; whether they reward it in this particular numbered, print-bearing form depends entirely on whether you came to learn or to collect.