I remember in fall of my junior year of high school, in October 2003, a girl came in to my newspaper class and said she wanted to write about Elliott Smith, a 34-year-old musician who allegedly had committed suicide.
I wasn’t familiar with Smith’s music at the time, but sometime in the following year I fell in love with his 1997 album “Either/Or,” along with the rest of his mellow, acoustic music.
Photographer Autumn de Wilde – who has worked with Beck, The White Stripes, Death Cab for Cutie, and more – met and became friends with Smith in 1997 and in November, a little more than four years after his death, she’ll release “Elliott Smith,” a book of photos she took of the late singer-songwriter.
Accompanying the photos are stories from friends, family, ex-lovers and musicians who knew Smith.
Some of de Wilde’s photos are on her Web site at www.autumndewilde.com, and the most recent issue of Spin Magazine has an excerpt from the book.
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