Steven Sebring's new documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life did not begin as a labor of love. In 1996, Sebring was a fashion photographer who had been hired by Spin magazine to shoot pictures of Smith, the timeless dark lady of punk, on the occasion of the release of Gone Again, he first album in eight years. At the time, he had never made a movie and barely knew who Smith was. But as Sebring described it to Terrence Rafferty, when he and Smith met for the first time, they both sensed "an immediate connection," and when he saw her perform at Irving Plaza, where she kicked off her first tour in more than fifteen years, something in Sebring's head caught fire. "She was a totally different woman onstage, nothing like the person I’d photographed in Detroit. I thought, this is too interesting not to put on film.”
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