Chris Stein

Chris Stein is the co-founder, songwriter and guitarist of the iconic punk band and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Blondie, whose recent studio album, ‘Pollinator’, was named one of Rolling Stone’s 20 Best Pop Albums of 2017. Beyond his era-defining music with Blondie, Stein has collaborated with a host of artists over the years, including Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, William Burroughs, Devo, Glenn O’Brien, and Shepard Fairey. Chris’ photographic work has been featured in the press and in galleries around the world, most prominently in a 2017 exhibition at London’s prestigious Somerset House that drew a reported 60,000 visitors. His first book of photography and essays, 2016’s Negative: Me, Blondie, and the Advent of Punk (Rizzoli) was hailed by Good Reads as “a must-have celebration of the new-wave and punk scene, whose influence on music and fashion is just as relevant today as it was four decades ago.”  With is second book Point of View: Me, New York City and the Punk Scene (Rizzoli), Stein expands upon that highly praised collection, which offered a unique, behind-the-scenes look at Blondie and its milieu. This time Stein recalls in photographs and words the rough-edged New York City streets he came of age in as an artist in the late sixties and seventies. Stein documents, most often in evocative black and white, an urban landscape filled with detritus yet teeming with life, from the avenues of midtown to the boardwalks of Coney Island. He offers a local’s view of the far-from-gentrified East Village neighborhood where he lived, and where the punk movement emerged.  And he shares previously unpublished images of such iconic figures of the era as Debbie Harry, his musical partner in Blondie; Andy Warhol; Iggy Pop; David Bowie; and the Ramones.  The New York Times notes “POINT OF VIEW: Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene is a fascinating document, not only of the punk scene of the early and middle 1970s but more generally of New York City in its years of chaos, decay and creative energy.” Based in New York.