Patti Smith, from the book Just Kids, after having visited the Museum of Art in Philadelphia for the first time at the age of 12:

I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

Just Kids is the story of Patti Smith, one of the greatest performers in music, and Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most significant and controversial photographers of our time.

This book, however, chronicles their lives before the fame and recognition. Patti and Robert are two fledgling kids living in New York City and full of a longing to live a creative life full of unconditional love and support.

   I was particularly moved by the drawing he had done on Memorial Day. I had never seen anything like it. What also struck me was the date: Joan of Arc's feast day. The same day I had promised to make something of myself before her statue.
   I told him this, and he responded that the drawing was symbolic of his own commitment to art, made on the same day. He gave it to me with out hesitation and I understood in this small space of time we had mutually surrended our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

My friend and author Jami Attenberg wrote a wonderful novel called The Melting Season and asked if I would read it and create something inspired by it.

Here's what I came up with.

I love these images.

Thanks for the inspiration, Jami.

Joanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York (1998) © Catherine Opie

From a feature on Catherine Opie in Art in America magazine’s December 2008 issue:

[For her] “Domestic” series (1995-98), [Catherine Opie] traveled the country photographing lesbian couples and families in their homes — her own version of the great American road trip embarked on by such photographers as Stephen Shore or Robert Frank.

[There's] the intimate, unkempt interior shown in Joanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York (1998) (above). On the table are the remains of breakfast — coffee cups and half-eaten bagels — and toys litter the floor in the home, where two white women live with their adopted Asian daughter. Opie describes this work as a “conversation” with Tina Barney, whose photographs portraying conventional, wealthy families (below) were being widely exhibited at the time. But of course it was more an argument than a conversation, a challenge to the idea that a family must be defined within a heterosexual framework.

The Daughters #246 (2002) © Tina Barney