Horse Attitudes
A new photo-book memorialises Patti Smith’s first trip to Paris as a rock star, including a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave. “She seemed very moved,” says Claude Gassian.
Poet’s corner: Patti Smith in Paris, 1976 – being “very friendly, very direct, very down-to-earth”
© 2025 Claude Gassian (4)
NERVOUS. THAT’S the word for Parisian photographer Claude Gassian as he waited to greet the rising star that was Patti Smith – unnerved by the defiant gaze beamed from the cover of her debut album, Horses. “That frontal black-and-white portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe,” as he describes it to MOJO today, “that look somewhere between Johnny Thunders and Keith Richards… That arrogance impressed and worried me at the same time.”