Professor Judith Linn: the accidental photographer

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art Judith Linn teaches photography, though she had originally planned to be a painter. Her art school, the Pratt Institute, forced her to take a photography class. "I hated it initially because I was so inept," Linn said. "I dropped it a few times ... I had always been good at art and I wasn't good at [photography]. It was very frustrating."

Linn eventually had to take a late-night session after dropping the class so many times, but in her last semester she had a good professor, Phillip Perkis, who changed everything. "I just got intrigued by [photography]. I couldn't figure it out," Linn said. "Once I learned a little bit of facility…I just became fascinated with it." Linn left painting behind and began to carry her camera everywhere. "I was taking pictures of everything. If I was on the bus in Brooklyn, I took pictures of Brooklyn," Linn said. "I wasn't filtering out what is subject matter or what isn't."

Still beginning her photography career, Linn met and befriended '70s punk icon Patti Smith through their boyfriends and mutual friends in 1968, years before Smith would skyrocket to national fame. "We'd seen a lot of the same movies. We liked a lot of the same music," Linn said. "It was make believe. It was like kids playing dress up more than anything else—fantasizing, and playing different roles." Linn and Smith had fun, and drew upon cinema for inspiration—some of their photos, Linn noted, would not look out of place in a Jean-Luc Godard film.

Linn released a book, Patti Smith 1969-1976, assembling the photos last year. The book is a mixture of both candid and staged black-and-white photos, and documents not only Patti Smith but also Smith's boyfriend and later confidante Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of the photos were taken to promote jewelry Mapplethorpe was making as well. The line between staged and candid photos isn't clear. Linn intended it that way. "I like both, and I like confusing people," Linn said. "It's nice to go back-and-forth." Linn describes it as a visual narrative, beginning with Linn's first photographs and ending just as Smith starts to have a bigger audience outside of just Linn. Linn had never guessed at Smith's future stardom at the time. "She was my friend and she liked to be photographed," Linn explained. "I knew she was very ambitious, and I knew she wanted a bigger audience."

Linn would first have her photography exhibited at P.S. 1 thanks to meeting Mapplethorpe's boyfriend, curator and collector Sam Wagstaff. Wagstaff curated Linn's first photography exhibition in 1980, and Linn has steadily had her work in galleries since. She now has her own gallery through Feature Inc. Feature Inc. acts an agent of sorts, handling any of Linn's body of work.

Linn eventually came to teach photography at her alma mater the Pratt Institute, and has settled now at Vassar. When Linn was at the Pratt Institute, there were only twocourses of study: graphics or art education. It was in graphics that Linn had to take photography, since Linn had no interest in pedagogy. However, when Linn nabbed a job teaching, her thought process was simple. "I got a job teaching. Why not?" she said.

Linn's approach to teaching photography is to emphasize its aesthetics. "We try and keep the technical very small, very short and very fast," Linn said. "I want to make it as simple as possible: to demystify the technical part and mystify the aesthetic part."

Linn said it is aesthetics, after all, which is important and meaningful in photography. "What do photographs make you think? What does it do to your brain? What does it do to your thoughts?" Linn said. "How does it affect your perceptions—does it endorse what you see, does it contradict what you see? Sometimes it can really change the way you see the world."

Currently, Linn is working on another photography book, but remains mum on the details. "I haven't gotten very far on it," she said, only revealing its focus is more a location, rather than a person.

Linn recalled a moment she had while putting the book together, a moment she used to conclude the afterword in her book. "I found this tape from one of the times we took photographs together," Linn said. On the cassette, Smith recites a poem by Brian Jones, a founding member of the Rolling Stones. "The tape recorder's on and we leave the room, and I'm listening to this tape," Linn continued, "and I realize I'm waiting for something that happened 40 years ago, and it just blew me away...I never saw the time go by." Linn concluded the afterword of Patti Smith 1969-1976 by writing, "Photographs let you hold the past in your hands, the imaginary past."