When photographer Lynn Goldsmith met Sting, he was a 20-something in an unknown British rock band called The Police who hadn’t yet released an album.
As a favor to a friend, the famed rock photographer met the trio for a shoot in New York in 1978. She soon found herself chronicling a band on a meteoric rise to rock stardom. Through The Police’s entire creative life through 1983 and through their five studio albums, Goldsmith had unfettered access in the studio, on the road and at home.
She also co-wrote a song with Sting, which she recorded in 1983 as Will Powers. The track, “Adventures in Success,” got a belated global boost in 2018 when it was featured in a Squarespace Super Bowl advertisement (it features Keanu Reeves singing along to the motivational Goldsmith/Sting tune while standing atop a speeding motorcycle).
On a visit to Sting’s London home in 1982, she created a shirtless portrait of the singer and bassist lying in the grass. During the recording of “Ghost in the Machine” in 1981 at Montserrat in the Caribbean, she recalled, she summoned the band outside for a sunset photo and Sting intuitively grabbed a saxophone to use as a prop.
“He had a sense of style and a sense of himself,” Goldsmith recalled. “I don’t have that with 90 percent of the artists I work with, where I have to direct and pick clothes and position someone. I’d be making pictures of Sting and he’d take his shirt off or whatever, like he did on stage. He was a great subject.”
(Photos by © Lynn Goldsmith)
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