Michael Grecco's "DAYS OF PUNK" Opening reception

“Days of Punk,” photographer and director Michael Grecco’s solo multimedia exhibition celebrating punk music and culture, opens Friday, May 19  at Anderson Yezerski Gallery in Boston, MA’s SoWa Arts District with an artist’s reception from 5-9PM.  The show runs through June 17, and marks the first time the “Days of Punk” exhibition will be on the east coast of the United States – in the city where most of the images were made. The show originally premiered with a special public installation at the international photography fair Photo London in 2021, and is currently touring in the U.S. and Europe.

Born in the Bronx and now based in Los Angeles, Grecco started his professional photography career in Boston in the late ‘70s after graduating from Boston University’s College of Communication. He was working as a news photojournalist for the Associated Press and staff photographer for the Boston Herald by day. At night, he covered the music scene for publications including Boston Rock magazine, and regularly for WBCN-FM – it was when punk music was exploding in popularity in the U.S., and Boston was an important hub for the punk scene. A self-described “club kid,” Grecco had a unique opportunity to embed himself into the scene as both a chronicler and a participant, and captured for posterity a riotously outspoken time in pop culture history, with all its raw energy and outrageous antics.

The photographs featured in the exhibition – of artists including The Clash, Billy Idol, The Cramps, Wendy O. Williams (Plasmatics), The B-52s, Devo and more – date back to the late ‘70s through the early ‘90s, shot primarily in the Boston area, with some images captured in New York City. The negatives from all the shoots had sat dormant in file cabinets for decades until Grecco’s archivist suggested revisiting this previously unseen body of work five years ago. Their efforts lead to Grecco’s most recent book Punk, Post Punk, New Wave: Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978–1991 (Abrams Books, 2020), which introduced these images to the public for the first time. The book, now in its third printing, also includes Grecco’s personal anecdotes from those years. In addition to the photographs, visitors to the gallery will experience soundscapes specially created for “Days of Punk” in collaboration with Roger Miller and Peter Prescott of the cult band Mission of Burma (played on speakers courtesy of Bang & Olufsen SoWa).

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