I grew up during the punk era and new wave eras, and was at least aware of the culture, though I was a long way from taking on a punk identity. I did go to a bunch of shows in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mainly at the famed City Gardens in New Jersey. Now I’m thinking about paying off my mortgage and planning my retirement life, but I still look back on those days fondly. Michael Grecco shot many photographs of shows in Boston in the late 1970s through to the late 1980s, and some are reproduced in this collection. You can find a few of them also on his web site. The release of the book seems to have some connection with a 4-episode documentary, Punk, streaming on Epix, released in 2019. 

The book is about 240 pages of mostly black and white shots. While Grecco’s website spells out who is pictured, where it was, and what year it was, for the pictures it shows, the book does not. You can do some detective work with the index to work out what you are looking at, but it takes some time. That’s a major flaw in the book. There are a couple of introductions which provide some context, and there is some writing in the book’s main pages, though it is hard to tell who wrote it — maybe Grecco. It looks like the shots are categorized according to the venues they were taken, which isn’t necessarily the most helpful approach for those who were not living in Boston at the time.

The photographs are interesting, though they would be more interesting if they included who they were of. As it is, you get some sense of the energy of the time, the grittiness and seediness of the scene, and some of the rebelliousness. It is always hard to know how much it was about people liking to behave badly and make money out of it, and how much of it was ideological. Then there was the music, which of course the book does very little to convey. At the time, it was tempting to argue that punk was real while new wave was all about image, but the photos in the book don’t really bear that distinction out. 

Still, as a coffee table book, PUNK POST PUNK NEW WAVE is a pleasure to browse through. There are shots from both onstage and behind the scenes, giving portraits of people who went on to become famous, or who didn’t. I was especially struck by images of The Cramps at The Channel. Singer Lux Interior has an intense relationship with his audience.

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews

Categories: ArtAndPhotography

Keywords: punk, photography, Boston