Some of you might remember a photo quiz I posted earlier this month wherein I tried to divine the location of the bar featured on the sleeve of Joe Jackson’s 1982 single, “Real Men.” It was a complicated challenge, to be sure. On a whim, I reached out to the photographer, one Gary Green — who is now a professor of art and photography up in Colby College in Maine — to see if he could shed some light.
Gamely, Mr. Green obliged, revealing that the establishment in question was the late, lamented P & G on the Upper West Side.
As it happened, Green mentioned that he was getting his website updated with similar pictures from his days on the downtown scene at places like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club. I asked him to let me know when those were up and ready for viewing.
This week, he got back to me!
By this stage of the proceedings, every record-collecting, nostalgia-haunted rock archivist has pored over now-iconic shots by photo luminaries like Godlis, Roberta Bayley, Bob Gruen, Allan Tannenbaum and a few notable others. These photographers and their images are inexorably linked to the scene they covered, and are almost as legendary as their subjects.
In Green’s case, however, not only did he capture incredible portraits of folks like Alex Chilton (below), Dee Dee Ramone, Deborah Harry, Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, Tom Waits, Robert Gordon and more, he also turned the camera around and caught telling glimpses of the crowds, the venues, the nooks and crannies and those seemingly incidental nuances that — in retrospect — fill out the details of a story. In some of these pictures, you can practically smell the cigarette smoke and beer breath. Green's pictures not only present candid moments with some famous -- and infamous -- faces, but they also frequently manage to attain that elusive sense of place.
Check out Gary Green’s photographs of New York City 1976 - 1986 by clicking right here.
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