Description

For the duration of the 1970s – from his days as a student at the School of Visual Arts through the foundation of the era-defining New Wave-band Blondie and his subsequent reign as epicenter of punk’s golden age – Chris Stein kept an unrivalled photographic record of the downtown New York City scene. Following in the footsteps of the successful book Negative, this spectacular new book presents a more personal and more visceral collection of Stein’s photographs of the era. Focusing on a single decade in Stein’s own world, the images presented here take readers from self-portraits in his run-down East-Village apartment to candid photographs of pop-cultural icons of the time and evocative shots of New York City streetscapes in all their most longed-for romance and dereliction. An eclectic cast of cultural characters – from Richard Hell and William Burroughs to Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, and Stephen Sprouse – appear here exactly as they were in the day, juxtaposed with children playing hopscotch on torn-down blocks, riding the graffiti-ridden subway, or cruising the burgeoning clubs of the Bowery.

At once a chronicle of one music icon’s life among his punk and New-Wave heroes and peers, and a love letter to the city that was the backdrop and inspiration for those scenes, P.O.V. transports us to another place and time.