“I’m known for photographing musicians, but that’s because there’s so much going on and people have to put other people in a box,” she says. “But I’ve done a lot more than that. I’m redoing my website now, and I’m going to have hundreds of pictures up there, not only photos of musicians, but shots of people like the president of Pakistan and writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer. I make portraits; that’s what I do.”

Even that is an understatement. Goldsmith has certainly left a mark on the history of rock-and-roll photography –– and the history of rock — with her portraits of Michael Jackson, Ozzy Osbourne, Patti Smith, Chuck Berry, Bob Marley, Tina Turner and other music greats. She has shot more than 100 album covers and seen her work exhibited at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as on the covers of dozens of books (The Complete Guitar Player Bob Dylan Songbook; Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography) and magazines (Life; Rolling Stone; Interview; Sports Illustrated).

She has also at one time or another been a record producer, a songwriter and recording artist. In 1972 she was a director of ABC’s In Concert rock series. In 1973 she made a film about Grand Funk Railroad called We’re An American Band, then became the band’s co-manager. And the early 1980s, she created an alter-ego named Will Powers and recorded a collection of hit dance tunes that offered oddball self-help advice. Along the way she also told Island Records founder Chris Blackwell not to sign a new band called U2, invented the selfie stick before selfies were called selfies, and produced several series of conceptual fine-art photography.

“Lynn Goldsmith is a force of nature. More than a whirlwind, she is like a tornado that sucks you into her energy field,” says Gail Buckland, curator of the landmark exhibition “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present,” which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009. Buckland noted in the show that Goldsmith “managed to capture Marianne Faithfull in the shower, follow Roger Daltrey and the B-52s fully clothed into the sea, and tiptoe with her camera to catch Debbie Harry and Chris Stein asleep in a rooftop hammock.” She adds that Goldsmith “is also one astute, talented, smart woman.”

Last year Goldsmith brought out the book Rock and Roll Stories, an autobiographical reflection on her life as a photographer and the personalities she captured with her camera, including one-time boyfriend Bruce Springsteen. A number of her images of Springsteen have been on view in a group exhibition called “The Photography of Bruce Springsteen,” which ends its run today at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York.

Meanwhile, today at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in Hollywood, Goldsmith is discussing rock’s influence on fashion with noted jewelry designer Loree Rodkin. The event, held as part of a buildup to the Grammy Awards on February 15, will also feature one of Goldsmith’s recent conceptual images — a portrait of David Bowie digitally constructed from photos of the late rock star that Goldsmith shot in 1978 and 1983. The piece is from a series called “Dancing with the Stars,” which Goldsmith describes as a “reinterpretation” of people she’s known who had a wide effect on the culture.

“It’s not about capturing a moment in time,” Goldsmith says. Rather, the series represents her own thoughts about fame and how artistic identities are built.

“The purpose is to show through the one master image the kind of work that goes into the making of the person in the photograph,” she says. “No one — Zappa, Bruce, Carly, Tom Petty — gets there without the work that goes into making up who you are as an artist.”

The “Rockin’ Chic”

Goldsmith’s “Dancing With the Stars” project grew out of a discussion she had some time ago with Chuck Close.

“I never considered anything I’d created for an album cover or a magazine to be art. I felt art was about intention,” she says. “So I got into this conversation with Chuck Close, who felt very strongly that art had nothing to do with intention — that it was about the process of creating, the work that goes into it. And I thought a lot about that. I thought, ‘Well, what I do is a lot of work. And what these musicians do is about their work ethic.”

Goldsmith’s biography notes that she graduated (magna cum laude) from the University of Michigan in three years, with degrees in both English and psychology. She also played bass and rhythm guitar in a band called the Walking Wounded. (Her classmate Jim Osterberg, later to become Iggy Pop, described her once as a “rockin’ chic.”) She grew up around cameras — her father was an avid amateur — and later picked up photography to storyboard shoots while working on the In Concert series.

“I always did portraits but never thought about making a living from it,” she said in one interview. “One day at ABC, someone from London Records wanted one of my storyboard pictures for an album cover. They offered a $1,000, and being funny I said $1,500, and they said ‘okay.’ I didn’t get $1,500 doing In Concert. Then I started looking at magazines and who would pay for photos. I didn’t have to stay in the realm of music and I could travel. I didn’t need a team. I could just make money by making pictures, which I loved to do. It’s more centered to my nature, which is immediate gratification.”

After launching her photo career, she created the LGI photo agency, which represented entertainment photographers around the world. (The agency was sold to Corbis in the 1990s.)

Goldsmith notes that she is not unlike many people who are best known as photographers but have had wide-ranging interests.  “Look at Gordon Parks — he wrote music and directed films, too,” she says. But as someone pointed out to her recently, even Gordon Parks didn't invent the selfie stick.

“Well, that’s true,” she said.

Understanding Musicians

 As early as 1972, Goldsmith used a camera-boom apparatus to photograph herself doing performance art in New York’s Washington Square Park — add that to her resume — but it was in the mid 2000s when her husband made her a device with a maneuverable head, which she took everywhere, from concerts to restaurants. “It was a great way to meet people,” she says.

Her turn as self-help guru Will Powers, certainly not the least of her accomplishments, came about as a reaction to the misogyny and violence she found in rap music. “I wanted to do something where I could be an inner voice making people feel positive and better about themselves,” she says. “But I didn’t want to be serious. I’m a tongue-in-cheek person.” The result was an album of songs like “Kissing with Confidence” and “Adventures in Success” that brought her a moment of pop stardom and remain  endearingly subversive.

As for U2, she went to see them perform with her friend Chris Blackwell, who was thinking about signing the new band to a contract. “I could pick winners,” she says. “But they were terrible — as musicians they were awful, and Bono couldn’t move. I said to Blackwell, ‘Are you kidding?’ His instincts were better than mine, though, and he signed them. He knew they had some talent, but that they were also going to work really hard. They are a great testament to what hard work can do.”

The stories in Goldsmith’s Rock and Roll Stories focused on the people she has known and photographed over the years. “For me the purpose of the book was to share what I’ve learned through the relationships that I’ve had. I’m fortunate in that many of those relationships were with people who other people want to know about, even if they don’t want to know about me,” she says.

Those relationships are the secret of her success — the details that make up the composite of her own identity as an artist.  “Because she understands the nature of rock and roll so well, she has as much empathy for the fans as she does for the stars,” notes Gail Buckland.

“What made me good at photographing rock stars is what made me good at photographing people in general,” Goldsmith says. “I can identify with how uncomfortable it can be to be in front of the camera, especially for people who in my opinion are real musicians. They’re not like actors who can turn themselves into other characters. So I give a lot of thought to the environment they’ll be in — whether it’s the music I’m playing or food I have for a session or the kind of assistants I have. All of that becomes part of the process of getting a person to forget who they are in front of the camera.”