Lynn Goldsmith

Lynn Goldsmith (born 1948) is an American photographer whose award‑winning portraiture has shaped the visual culture of celebrity and beyond. Raised in New York, she studied fine art before launching a career that saw her work grace the pages and covers of Life, Newsweek, Time, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, People, Elle, Interview, and The New Yorker. Her piercing, elegantly lit images of musicians, actors, and political figures throughout the 1970s and ’80s helped define the era’s “rock and roll” aesthetic in editorial photography.

In 1976 Goldsmith founded LGI Photo Agency—one of the first firms dedicated to celebrity portraiture—representing more than two hundred photographers worldwide. After selling LGI in 1997, she turned her lens inward, developing a series of self‑portraits staged against New York’s luxury store windows. These digitally collaged works blend Goldsmith’s own figure with lavish, story‑book backdrops to interrogate the narratives consumer culture projects onto our identities.

Her ongoing series The Looking Glass combines art‑historical references, cinematic lighting, and mythic archetypes to explore the interplay between perception and imagination. By placing herself in elaborate, hybrid scenes of fantasy and reality, Goldsmith asks what it truly means to be human in a world where we are defined as much by what we see in the mirror as by what we see reflected in society’s showcases.