“There was so much new music and such a variety of music on the charts,” Lynn Goldsmith tells Billboard of compiling Music in the ’80s
: “Everything was so big — big hair, big budgets, big egos, big paintings. Could it really have been as airhead as it seems now?”
A number of the photos look like they might have good stories behind them. A shot of Paul Simon and Lou Reed leaves the impression that they could be in the middle of an argument, and another depicts Keith Richards walking along a deserted New York City street while an elderly woman stares at him as if she is witnessing the first sign of an alien invasion.
But Goldsmith, whose work is among the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum, says she has no tales to tell. “I’m so focused on the visual, you’re safe telling me anything,” says the photographer, who owns a and is working on a Springsteen photo book for Taschen. “I could never repeat it because I could never remember it.”