Posts tagged “Chris Stein”

Chris Stein: Point of View – Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene

Posted on December 11, 2018

Legs McNeil, Anya Philips, and Debbie on the Staten Island ferry. More Punk magazine outtakes, 1976. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

Brooklyn’s own Chris Stein took up photography in 1968, at the age of 18, and began to amass a body of work documenting New York life as the punk scene came into existence. In 1973, he met and began working with Debbie Harry, and together they founded Blondie. From this rarified position, Stein had the best view in the house, the consummate insider in the quintessential outsider scene.

His new book, Point of View: Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene (Rizzoli New York), is a visual diary of daily life during the 1970s, the rawest decade of them all. Stein takes us all the way back to his days as a student at SVA, and gives us a guided tour of a young artist coming of age in a city that was equal parts decadent and derelict, and home to characters like none before or since, be it William Burroughs, David Bowie, Divine, Andy Warhol, or the Ramones.

Much like the people who have departed the earth, Point of View is filled with iconic landmarks of the city that have since disappeared like the Fillmore East, the Women’s House of Detention, Times Square strip clubs, graffiti-covered trains, abandoned cars on the street, and the World Trade Center. They say you can’t go home again, so what’s a True Yorker to do?

Put it down in photographs and stories, so we can always remember the way we were, word to Babs. We have assembled here some of Stein’s choice photographs and stories from the book for a trip back to a time not so long ago that is so very far away.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Snuky Tate, Fab 5 Freddy, and kid punk band the Brattles, 1981. The Brattles opened for the Clash at their New York City show at Bonds on Times Square. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Just Chaos! Curated by Roberta Bayley

Posted on May 16, 2013

Marcia Resnick, Johnny Thunders, 1972

Books and photographs. Photographs and books. The historical record reflects the times as they were lived by those who were there. And here we are, some four decades later, reflecting on punk as it first came up on the streets of New York, along the Bowery, at CBGBs, a mélange of artists, performers, and personalities making for great photography, for stories that are shared and collected, for memories rediscovered and truths being told. For those who were there, and those who missed it, Just Chaos! takes us back to a time and a place where you damn sure better do it yourself, cause if you don’t ain’t no one else.

In the windows and intimate niches of BookMarc, New York, now through May 23, Roberta Bayley has installed selections from 13 photographers of the era:, many which have not been seen before this exhibition. Featuring the work of Bayley, Janette Beckman, Stephanie Chernikowski, Lee Black Childers, Danny Fields, Godlis, Julia Gorton, Bobby Grossman, Bob Gruen, Laura Levine, Eileen Polk, Marcia Resnick, Chris Stein, and Joe Stevens, the photographs featured here are curated with an eye towards style, inspired by the energy of the era as it manifested in the world at that time. “It’s all based in poverty,” Bayley reflects. Everything was D.I.Y., do it yourself.

Fashion, music, style, photography—all of it came as an expression of the truth: after the hippie movement sparked, it became mainstream and lost its edge. Punk came out of that void, all claws and fangs and guitar strings, spikes and torn clothes. It was street, strung out and sexy. It was the artist as anti-hero, a Romantic poem at the end of the second millennium AD. It was about the absolutes of individualism, of speaking your own voice and saying F the system.

But the only constant in life is change, and in one’s own lifetime there are seismic shifts. And now it is that we look to books and photographs to remind us of how it used to be so that we may reflect and consider how the only constant is change. Godlis reflects, “Everyone went down to CBGBs. Everyone would come up with new ideas and you could connect with them. We put flyers on lampposts. That was the Internet of the day. You did not wait for something to be done by someone else.”

Making something out of nothing is what New York has been about, being an original, being authentic, having something no one else could touch. The depths to which Richard Hell, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, the Dead Boys, and so many others brought to their music was matched by the eye of the photographers whose energy enhanced their own. A dialogue was born, a conversation of photographs, emblems, images, icons. It was a new way of looking at the world, a freedom that came from commitment to one’s artistry.

Marcia Resnick explains, “Punks express themselves with youthful aplomb, audacity and honesty. They realize their creative drives without reservation, whether they are making music or outfitting themselves in unique attire. They do things to the best of their abilities without consideration for polish or acceptance.” Consider her photograph of Johnny Thunders: “He covered his face with a kerchief, like the Lone Ranger. He wore a syringe, like a feather, in his hat. He is the incarnation of audacity.”

And it was this audacity that first sailed across the seas, back to the UK, influencing their culture in notorious ways. As Janette Beckman notes, “Punk brought an anti-establishment raw freshness to music, art and style and politics. It was about change, the idea that people should question authority and ‘do it for themselves’. At that time the economy in the UK was terrible, the three day work week, no jobs, no future, British class system, led people to rebel against the way things were and had always been. Punk was an attitude and a life style, that changed everything in the UK.”

Punk has power because it is rooted in the commitment of the individual. Taking on its ethos requires one to maintain a level of personal integrity uncompromised by expectation of objection. As Bobby Grossman recalls, “My photos were synonymous with PUNK.I abandoned a career in painting and Illustration (BFA Rhode Island School of Design) and after a few visits to CBGB to see the first Talking Head shows. I picked up a camera and began to document my visits every night. I had basic photography skills and I found that a Konica point and shoot camera was the simplest and easiest way to go. I often shot from the hip so some of my images included the graffiti on the ceiling while missing most of the composition or maybe just getting a portion of it. I was very in the moment. Many or most No Wave and PUNK musicians were novices to their instruments and I guess you could say the same about me and my camera.”

Punk is the great equalizer. Take it and make it yours. You don’t need money. You don’t need hype. Do It Yourself. Take photographs. Make books. Hang shows. Photography offers a path into the past that makes it come alive in every glance. The cumulative effect of Just Chaos! is breathtaking. It is the awareness that this is it, this is the tipping point in history. We are back on Bleecker Street. The time is not the same, but the time is always now to be making moves.

Janette Beckman, Punks, Worlds End, London 1978

Categories: 1970s, Art, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Jiani Jenny Chen Shot Rock & Roll’s Hottest Photogs

Posted on November 5, 2009

maripol2

va va voooom! miss MARIPOL is THE BOMB. the sexy kind.

kwamebrathwaite

i must have taken more then ten photos of KWAME BRATHWAITE, but he was a sweetheart about it

MARCIA RESNICK was totally dressed to ROCK, i stalked her a little to get this pic

not only is MASAYOSHI SUKITA awesome for coming all the way from Japan, he was a perfect gentleman, with a chic Asian posse in tow.. my camera and i timidly bowed a couple of times in thanks

GODLIS is the kind of photographer who’d have amazing stories about Rock and Roll in NYC back in the 80s- come hear him talk with Gail Buckland on November 10th .

who better to stand with miss Tina than the photographer himself, HENRY DILTZ

elainemayes

oops i accidentally disturbed ELAINE MAYES while she was doing her own documenting of the show to get her photograph hehe

i adore LAURA LEVINE’S work, so much that i blocked out the dude’s photograph below hers hahaha (jk)

bobseidemann

BOB SEIDEMANN is my favorite of the night. he coached me for like 10 minutes in taking this photo, all the while making me giggle like an Asian schoolgirl, he was SO FUNNY!

EDWARD COLVER’S photograph is sooo intense, they made a shirt out of it- in the Brooklyn Museum ROCK SHOP!

CHRIS STEIN and JOHN HOLMSTROM were the perfect duo of ROCK & ROLL

www.simplychen.com

www.missrosen.us

Categories: Art, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Chris Stein Shot Richard Hell and Debbie Harry

Posted on August 31, 2009

Chris Stein – The Legend of Nick Detroit

Chris Stein, guitarist and songwriter, was born in Brooklyn. In the early 70s, Stein joined the glam-rock group the Stilettos, which featured Deborah Harry as its lead singer. After the Stilettos fell apart, Stein and Harry formed the hugely popular and successful punk/New Wave band Blondie. Stein wrote the hit song “Sunday Girl,” and co-wrote, with his onetime-girlfriend Harry, Blondie hit songs including “Heart of Glass,” “Dreaming,” “Rapture,” “Picture This,” “Rip Her to Shreds,” and “Island of Lost Souls.” He ran the label Animal Records from 1982 to 1984, and also did the album cover for “Exposure,” Robert Fripp’s solo album, the first record cover done will all color Xeroxes. Stein not only composed the scores for the films “Union City” and “Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story,” but also was a co-composer on the scores for the movie “Wild Style” and the TV special “When Disco Ruled the World.” In the late 90s Chris and Harry relaunched Blondie; since then the group has recorded two albums and continues to perform in concert all over the world. Stein, also a longtime photographer, has done album artwork for Lydia Lunch and Dramarama.

Stein discusses his works collaborations with John Holmstrom for PUNK magazine, Richard Hell and Debbie Harry, Seventeenth Street, New York City, “The Legend of Nick Detroit,” and Anya Phillips and Debbie Harry,” selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

You are a musician as well as a photographer, which gives you a unique insight into the relationship between photography and music. How do you feel the image impacts the listener’s understanding of the music?

Chris Stein: I have never figured out or decided if image was a plus or a minus when it comes to defining one’s musical style. I often say in interviews that when I was a teenager “most of my heroes were 60 year old black men.” This of course is a reference to trends that embrace only youth and fancy fashion as the mark of success. Recently much was made of the dowdy matron who appeared on some TV talent show and was endowed with a terrific singing voice. But there the context was all about her unattractiveness, which then became her selling point thereby negating the whole argument. Very weird!

Your photographs in Who Shot Rock & Roll feature the distinctive graphics of John Holmstrom. They are unlike any other image in the book, as they show your willingness to collaborate with yet another artist in the creation of the image. How did you come to create these images—clearly they were staged, but did you have the end product in mind when you set out to shoot, or was this something that came about through the process of creation itself?

Going into the various PUNK magazine projects with John, I was already familiar with the form: that of the Fumetti, a photo story that was laid out like a comic strip, often with speech balloons for the characters. Fumettis began, I think, in the early 60s and are currently more popular in Latin America and Europe than in the U.S. John Holmstrom was a source of many terrific ideas and working with a large number of our peers from the rock scene in NYC was great fun! In many of the photos I left room for the speech balloons when composing the shot.

What advantages do you see in shooting your own band and artistic coterie instead of having someone from the outside doing it?

Just the familiarity between us makes it easier to shoot candid moments.

In the days before the Internet and digital photography, when content was seemingly limited to those with access, the creation of images played a massive role in the music. How does your work contribute to this archive?

Because Debbie was so photogenic and appealing in pictures it was easy to disseminate shots of her to the media early on. Many people saw her image before hearing the bands music. During the 70s in the UK the weekly national music press didn’t have an equivalent in the U.S. and because of this many bands were visually available to British music fans prior to those bands music being heard or played on radio. This phenomenon certainly contributed to the popularity of “punk,” which relied heavily on elements of fashion to define itself.

Chris Stein – Staten Island Ferry

Categories: Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Photography