By Glenwood
Legendary music photographers Janette Beckman and David Corio (left and right, below) have an excellent exhibition going on now at the Morrison Hotel Gallery on Bowery, right next to the old CBGB (which is now a John Varvatos outlet), and if you were alive and in love with music in the late 1970s and 1980s, it’s kind of a must-see show. Titled Catch the Beat: The Roots of Punk and Hip Hop Photography, Beckman and Corio’s exhibition features scads of insanely great images–some familiar, many of which we had never before seen–of the icons of the era.
Here, for example, are Public Enemy, from the mid ’80s, posing in an unlikely rural setting. Corio, who was on hand at the Morrison Hotel Gallery and, even better, was nice enough to chat with us a bit, told us that the shot was actually taken in Hyde Park, and that he had to hold back the suits just trying to walk through the park on the way to the office, and who had no clue who Chuck D, Flava Flav, Terminator X and the S1Ws were, other than a crew of oddly dressed young men making them late for work. Corio’s portrait of Biz Markie (below) flashing his chains is a great photograph, too (we had the pleasure of shaking Markie’s hand back in the mid-’80s, and he couldn’t have been more pleasant… nor more HUGE), as is his silhouetted shot of Afrika Bambaataa, scratching in London. [Read More]
