arts and design

Trash, leather, sleaze: how Gary Green shot New York's punk scene

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In early 1976 Gary Green, aged 22 and not long out of college, was living with his parents in the suburbs of Long Island. On weekends he would travel into Manhattan to watch shows by the likes of glam-rock veterans the New York Dolls and aspiring punk poet Patti Smith. That summer, he rented an apartment in the West Village and began working as an assistant to a commercial photographer, a job that allowed him to “go out every night and take photographs”.

Patti Smith and Ivan Karl in 1976



Poet … Patti Smith and Ivan Král in 1976. Photograph: Gary Green

That April, the Ramones released their eponymous debut album, the first signal of the seismic shift in pop culture that was punk. Green was a clued-up music fan with a camera in the right place at exactly the right time. He began shooting in venues like CBGB on the Bowery, where a scene was coalescing around groups such as the Ramones, Television, Blondie and Talking Heads. Green took his photos to the music paper New York Rocker, he says. “The editor, Alan Betrock, gave me my first assignment, which was to photograph this young rockabilly-obsessed singer, Robert Gordon. It all started from there.”

It has taken 44 years for Green’s monochrome photographs of New York’s punk and post-punk scene to see the light of day with the publication of When Midnight Comes Around. It is a book filled with familiar faces – Smith, Joey Ramone, Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders – and now legendary and long-gone places such as CBGB, Max’s Kansas City and the Bottom Line. What sets it apart is the sense that Green was both an insider – for a time, he shared an apartment with Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls – and an acute social observer who understood that he was witnessing an important pop-cultural moment driven by outsiders and misfits.

His photographs of the soon-to-be-famous are punctuated by portraits of anonymous individuals who caught his eye with their style or attitude. The result is a democratic portrait of an emerging New York punk scene that looks both distant and timeless.

“I thought what I was doing was a kind of social documentary. I had seen Diane Arbus’s work and would later take a class with Lisette Model, who had taught Arbus. I think this accounts for my straight-on approach, but also my desire to shoot people who weren’t famous,” he says. “Also, I was never a fan of live photography. I preferred to turn away from the stage and look at what was going on around me.”

Setting the scene … sleazy streets around Times Square.



Setting the scene … sleazy streets around Times Square. Photograph: Gary Green

The book opens with two scene-setting shots: a pair of bohemian-looking women selling secondhand clothes on a sidewalk in Manhattan’s East Village and a ground-level view of the sleazy porn cinemas that once dotted the streets on Times Square. This is another New York, grittier and edgy, a city close to financial bankruptcy. Its more neglected neighbourhoods, where rents were low and crime rates high, drew artists and musicians attuned to an emerging punk aesthetic that fed off and was energised by the surrounding seediness. “The lower East Side is trendy now, but back then I didn’t go there unless I really had to. Even the little kids there were tough and threatening.”

Green’s early photographs from 1976/77 evoke the ad-hoc atmosphere of what was then a small, evolving downtown scene, just as his later ones reflect the shift towards a more self-consciously stylish milieu as punk mutated into post-punk, the music becoming more arty and angular. Alongside New York scenesters such as Anya Phillips, co-founder of the Mudd Club, Green also snapped a young, dapper Tom Waits, a lonesome-looking Alex Chilton in CBGB, and Lou Reed with Andy Warhol at an early solo show by erstwhile New York Doll David Johansen at the Bottom Line.

David Johansen, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, backstage at the Bottom Line in the 1970s.



Hanging out … David Johansen, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, backstage at the Bottom Line in the 1970s. Photograph: Gary Green

“People were there in those clubs to be noticed,” he says, “so it was never that difficult to get access. Despite the look of everyone – cool, detached, tough – it was a fairly friendly scene.”

It is the unknown faces that most intrigue. Some, like Babette and Katrina, denizens of the Chelsea Hotel, he remembers well: “They were both French and ‘danced’ for a living.” The names of others, he cannot recall. In one photo, taken in what looks like someone’s kitchen, a young Green, looking smart in a crisp white shirt, stands next to Sylvain Sylvain and two members of his post-New York Dolls group, the Criminals. I know it’s him, because Green told me; there are no identifying captions in the book.

Tom Waits in 1976.



Dapper … Tom Waits in 1976. Photograph: Gary Green

“Given that many of the people who can’t be identified were not famous, it democratises the series by giving everyone the same treatment,” he explains. “I would rather people have too little information than too much. It means the pictures stand up on their own.”

For a short time in the early 80s, Green worked as a jobbing music photographer, shooting album covers for Robert Gordon and Link Wray as well as editorials for Rolling Stone, Downbeat and SoHo Weekly News. In 1986, he left the city and attended graduate school a few hours north of the city in an attempt “to really rethink and reinvestigate photography anew”. One of his teachers was Stephen Shore, under whose influence his practice shifted towards landscape and the built environment.

Green is now an academic and an established photographer, with three other photobooks and his work bought by several US art institutions. He looks back on his punk photographs with fondness and a degree of melancholy. “So many people in the book have died or grown so much older,” he says. “It was my youth, it was my music, and so much of me is tied up in that work that it was quite a challenge to immerse myself in it.”

Yet he claims to only have one regret about that period: “Why the hell didn’t I photograph the really seedy bathroom in CBGB?”

When Midnight Comes Around is published by Stanley/Barker.

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