Shared Light at Selby Gardens
Lynn Goldsmith finds the same fragile grace in flowers and in friendship

There is a particular kind of light that photographers chase for a lifetime: the kind that falls between full bloom and the first hint of wilting, between a pose and the moment just after it breaks. Lynn Goldsmith has spent five decades finding that light, first through the lens pointed at some of the most famous faces of the twentieth century, and now through the petals and stems of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

This summer, Selby Gardens’ Downtown Sarasota campus becomes the stage for Shared Light: Lynn Goldsmith, on view through September 13, 2026. The exhibition pairs Goldsmith’s botanical photography with something far more personal: intimate portraits of Patti Smith, the legendary musician and poet who serves as Selby Gardens’ artist in residence. It’s an unusual combination, flowers and rock and roll, but for Goldsmith, the two have never felt far apart.

“My photographs of flowers linger in that brief territory between bloom and surrender, where beauty is never separate from fragility,” Goldsmith says of the work. The portraits of Smith, she explains, live in that same territory. “Our relationships unfold much the same way as flowers do — reaching toward light, opening in trust, bruised by time, yet carrying an elegance that survives even in fading.”

Selby Gardens Shared Light image by Lynn Goldsmith – Photo by Matthew Holler

It’s a rare thing for an artist to speak about a friendship the way one might speak about a garden, but Goldsmith and Smith’s connection spans decades, forged in the same era that produced Goldsmith’s most iconic celebrity work. Over the course of her career, Goldsmith’s images have run on or between the covers of Life, Newsweek, Time, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated, among many others, and her photographs live permanently in institutions including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Seventeen books carry her name, including Flower (Rizzoli, 2000) and Patti Smith: Before Easter After, first released as a deluxe limited edition by Taschen in 2019, then in a trade edition by Rizzoli in 2024.

Shared Light brings both threads of that career, the botanical and the biographical, into the same rooms for the first time at Selby Gardens, filling the Downtown Sarasota campus’s indoor galleries and outdoor grounds alike.

Selby Gardens Shared Light-Lynn Goldsmith – Photo by Matthew Holler

For Selby Gardens’ President & CEO Jennifer Rominiecki, the exhibition is a natural extension of the Gardens’ mission to connect art, science, and nature. “This exhibition beautifully bridges the worlds of fine art, music, and nature through Goldsmith’s evocative floral imagery and her personal portraits of Patti Smith, our artist in residence,” Rominiecki says. “Together, these works create a powerful dialogue about creativity, connection, and inspiration that we believe will resonate with our visitors in the immersive setting of our Downtown Sarasota campus.”

That dialogue is very much the point. Set against the bayfront backdrop of Selby’s 15-acre campus, home to the world’s only botanical garden dedicated to epiphytic orchids, bromeliads, gesneriads, and ferns, Goldsmith’s images of flowers and friendship ask visitors to consider how closely the two are related. Blossoms open, catch the light, and eventually fade. So do the people we love. Goldsmith’s camera has always been drawn to that in-between moment, whatever the subject.