WATCH: Patti Smith Talks About Her First Encounters with Robert Mapplethorpe

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another)—the multimedia exploration of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, composed by Bryce Dessner—includes the writing of Mapplethorpe’s longtime partner and confidant, Patti Smith. Their relationship is central to Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, and she elaborates on that kinship in this beautiful, candid conversation at the Louisiana Literature Festival. “The thing that we had transcended everything, and that was that we bonded through our work,” she says. “Both of us felt magnified by the other. I still feel it today.”