From the Mercer Arts Center chaos of the New York Dolls to John Lennon’s New York City T-shirt, the moments that defined a career

Transmission 343: Interview with Bob Gruen

Bob Gruen has spent decades behind the lens documenting the pulse of music at its most electric and unguarded. His prestigious archive functions as a time capsule of the most iconic musical moments of the New York City skyline; he wasn’t just a witness to history, he was a primary visual narrator. Widely regarded as one of the most important music photographers of all time, his portfolio reads like a “Who’s Who” of music history. Photography was his mother’s hobby. She would take him into the darkroom with her, and he had been involved with it since then. She taught him what she knew, and then he taught himself after that. His first published photo was a picture of a fire published in a local Long Island newspaper, as he used to take pictures for the school newspaper. After high school, he decided to live with his friends in the City. They were forming bands, and he was always taking pictures of everything. When his friend’s band Glitterhouse got signed, he met the people at Atlantic Records and started taking pictures of other bands for them. In his early years of shooting, he used to carry 4×6 black and white photos with his phone number on the back and hand them out.

From the stadium grandeur of Led Zeppelin to the raw, nihilistic birth of punk, Gruen served as an ultimate visual bridge. He was among the pioneers of capturing and documenting the high-octane energy of the CBGB era, immortalizing the rise of Blondie, the Ramones, and Patti Smith amidst the grime and glory of the Bowery. By building deep, personal relationships with his subjects, he captured moments that feel both monumental and deeply intimate: the sound, the sweat, and the rebellion of an era. With a career spanning over five decades, his images remain a visual soundtrack to rock history. This extraordinary journey is masterfully chronicled in his key book, Right Place, Right Time: The Life of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Photographer, which details how he moved from the front row into the inner circle. Gruen’s photography has been primarily represented by Morrison Hotel Gallery since 1980. Today, his work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, cementing his status as the man who didn’t just see the Golden Age of Rock, but helped define how the world would remember it.

He believes that music is about emancipation. Most of the bands he personally likes are making a statement, and a significant one at that. Their music reaches people who are often lonely, alienated, and in need of something to believe in, encouraging faith in oneself rather than dependence on the band. He thinks the band promotes self-confidence. Bob Gruen’s iconic photography has not only graced numerous album covers but has also been compiled into several books documenting the lives of music’s greatest legends; furthermore, he has contributed to various films that delve deeper into their extraordinary stories. As a humanitarian, Gruen has collaborated with several domestic and foreign organizations to raise funds for their life-affirming initiatives, including WhyHunger, Her Justice, Tibet House, the Donaldson Adoption Institute, the Kristen Ann Carr Fund, Save the Music, MusicCares, and the Aperture Foundation. Gruen won the inaugural John Lennon Real Love Award at the 32nd Annual John Lennon Tribute Concert in December 2014 in recognition of his numerous charitable endeavors.

On October 20, 2026, his new book will be available: All I Want Is a Picture of You: Photographing Debbie Harry and Blondie, 1974–2024, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Blondie with rare and never-before-seen photographs. If Gruen’s archive speaks to you, our dedicated section on music photography is worth a long visit; some of the most significant names behind the lens are already there, and several more are on their way.

Official Site

You credit starting your career when you first saw Ike & Tina Turner perform at Madison Square Garden during the Rolling Stones’ American tour. What were the main challenges of this period?

I wasn’t photographing when I saw them at Madison Square Garden at the Rolling Stones. That was before I started my career, actually. I met them a year later when I took some pictures, and then I accidentally met Ike Turner and he liked the photos, and then I started working with him in 1971.

I met him in 1970. So I was just there as a fan of the Rolling Stones, and I remember seeing Tina, I remember Janis Joplin coming out and singing with her, but I wasn’t taking any pictures that year. I started my career a year later.

When I met Ike and Tina, I started working a lot with them. I started traveling with them, got very comfortable with them. We became good friends.

There’s actually a DVD that’s available of my work, of videotapes of Ike and Tina Turner. It’s the only video of them backstage and traveling and actually Tina at home. It’s a great video.

Ike and Tina Turner on the Road 1971-72 is what it’s called.

Photography can be a great tool to understand as well as document. How did taking pictures of the New Wave and the punk movement change your understanding of rebellion and youth culture of the era?

Well, you’re making an assumption. It didn’t change my understanding at all. I was part of it.

It wasn’t something that suddenly sprung on the world. Life happens one day at a time. I didn’t see that there was a punk movement suddenly appearing.

I saw bands every day and the bands got faster and they got louder. They say that the punks are just hippies with short hair. So it’s just a similar feeling of being dissatisfied with the current status quo, the way things were, and just wanting a better future.

The Sex Pistols gave punk a really bad name when they cursed on TV. But the Sex Pistols were screaming with rage, while the Clash gave people the reasons. The Sex Pistols were looking back with anger, but the Clash looked to the future with hope.

There’s a lot of hope and a lot of positive attitude in the punk and New Wave movement. That was what I was concerned with; the positive attitude of just wanting a better world, which I think everybody still wants.

You’ve captured incredibly intimate moments with stars who were notoriously guarded. How did you balance being a “fly on the wall” with the reality that your presence essentially changed the room? 

I try not to change the room with my presence. That’s the idea of being the fly on the wall; they don’t really notice you. On the other hand, rather than intruding or observing a situation, I tried to be part of the situation.

So I would always bring something. If they were drinking, I would bring a bottle. If they were smoking, I’d bring something there.

If they were interested, maybe I’d have a new record or something to turn people on to. So I wasn’t really just intruding. I didn’t visit CBGB’s as a journalist to stare at people and observe them.

I was part of it. That was my neighborhood bar. Those were my friends.

It was part of my life. It wasn’t something that I was observing and judging in any way.

You weren’t just a witness to history; you were the primary visual narrator of it. What can you tell us about the vibes of the chaotic nights with the New York Dolls? What is your best memory related to that atmosphere?

One of the best memories of the New York Dolls is when I first walked in and saw them and it was just total chaos. I’d never seen such chaos before. I went to see them at the Mercer Arts Center because the band I was working with, John and Yoko, were working with the Elephant’s Memory Band and they had the same manager as the New York Dolls.

So someone in their office said I should go and see them. I remember when I walked in the room, it was just complete chaos. It was like walking into a Fellini satirical movie.

All kinds of weird people jumping around and on the stage, and the band was kind of in a little area. I mean, people were all around the band. There wasn’t a stage.

It was just an area like a dance floor and they were in the middle and everybody was dancing and yelling and singing. That was really chaotic. The New York Dolls were really kind of loud and fun and they wore frilly clothes.

They liked to dress up and be very pretty, not because they were homosexual. They dressed as dolls, I think, because girls like to play with dolls. They were very interested in meeting a lot of girls.

So they liked to be very beautiful so that the girls would like them. And they did. They attracted more groupies than any other band I worked with.

It was just fun. They were free and open and saying whatever they wanted. And certainly they were drinking a lot.

I wouldn’t recommend that today. It’s a different world today. Back in those days, people were freely drinking all day, all night.

Nowadays, you can’t really get away with that. It’s a different world today. But back then, it was certainly a lot of fun.

One of the leading music photographers, having worked with prominent artists such as John Lennon, Tina Turner, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and Kiss. He also wrote on developing new wave and punk music acts such as the New York Dolls, Clash, Sex Pistols, Ramones, The Dynomiters, Blondie and musicians as the Who, David Bowie, Elton John, Aerosmith, Kiss, and Alice Cooper.

You have been the most trusted eye in music for over five decades. While others were stuck in the press pit, you were in the dressing rooms, on the tour buses, and sharing private moments with the artists. How did you decide when not to take a picture?

I don’t like to embarrass people. It’s pretty obvious when somebody is doing something that they don’t want to be in public. I learned early on that if there was ever a court case and somebody was bringing a photo into a court case, like a drug case, if they introduce a photo to a court, the photographer has to testify about the validity, about where the photo came from.

So if anybody was doing anything illegal, like taking drugs or something like that, I put my camera down because I never wanted to testify against anybody. I never took pictures of anybody taking any drugs. I might have seen that happen a few times, certainly in the 70s, but I never took any pictures like that.

It’s kind of easy to know when you’re intruding and when you’re not. I mean, you know the difference between a private moment and something that somebody wants to show to the public. It’s not hard to figure that out.

Every photographer has a “ghost” shot—the perfect moment they saw but couldn’t capture because the light was wrong or the film ran out. What is the most vivid image in your mind that never made it into a negative?

I do have one in particular. I had flown to Atlanta to take pictures of the Bob Dylan tour, and he wasn’t even allowing photographers. I had to sneak my cameras in and wait till the end.

During the encore, I would start taking pictures. It was in Atlanta; Jimmy Carter, who was the governor at that point (this was in the 70s), was at the concert and I ended up just a row or two behind him. So Bob Dylan was looking right over in that direction and I was taking perfect pictures of Bob Dylan looking right ahead; three-quarter color pictures, bang, bang, bang, bang.

I was taking so many pictures that I thought that maybe I’d gone past the end of the roll. When I checked, it turned out that when I was changing the film in the camera, I forgot to put the film in. So I took about 40 pictures of Bob Dylan that were absolutely perfect, with no film.

That does happen sometimes, not too often, luckily. But it happened once or twice.

In the 70s, your photos were often the only way fans could “see” their idols. Today, everyone has a phone camera and uses social media in their pocket and artists post their own “candid” shots. Does the modern saturation of imagery make rock stars feel more human, or does it kill the mystique that made your era so iconic?

I really don’t know how the rock stars feel about it, but I always enjoy taking pictures and I think it’s great that so many people can enjoy taking pictures themselves. It does kind of kill the business because it used to be that if you wanted a photograph, you actually had to hire a photographer who had a camera. Most people didn’t even have a camera.

You had to hire somebody who had a camera and knew how to operate all the different settings and focusing and film speeds and all those kind of things, and then be able to develop the film and then be able to make a print of it and then be able to have enough togetherness to send the print out and get it to the magazines. Nowadays, you touch the camera, you get a picture, you touch it again and you’ve sent it all over the world. So it’s a very, very different world.

But like I said, I always enjoy taking pictures, so I think it’s great that so many people can take pictures. For me, I’m very lucky that I have such an archive of great pictures that people like to buy. Nowadays, I make a living selling pictures because I don’t really take pictures anymore because everybody’s taking their own pictures.

Also, a lot of the people that I worked with in the music business have moved on or passed away. So it’s a whole different business nowadays.

Did any artist ever  change or challenge your creative instincts? Did friendship change the way you photographed people like The Clash or Led Zeppelin?

Certainly if you get to be friends with somebody, you get to spend more time with them. You get opportunities to take much more candid photos, much more photos in general. So, yes, when you become friends with somebody, it changes the situation a lot.

I became friends with a number of different rock stars, mostly because I kind of shared the same lifestyle. I stayed up all night. In those days, I used to imbibe the same drinks and so on.

A number of the artists I became friends with; not everybody. Sometimes I meet somebody for an interview. I spent five minutes taking pictures.

That’s the only time I ever saw them. But other times I would get to be friends with somebody and hang out. Certainly with the New York Dolls and with the Clash and the Sex Pistols, those people became like family.

We’re still friends today. Not the Dolls; they’re all gone. But the remaining members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols are good friends today.

Debbie Harry, I see all the time.

What’s a completely ordinary moment you captured that turned out to be historically important? Has there ever been a moment you unexpectedly captured that surprised you?

When John Lennon asked me to come to his apartment to take some pictures on a rooftop; he had a penthouse apartment, we went outside to take a whole series of photos, just close-ups of his face for the album cover, Walls and Bridges. After we had taken ten rolls of pictures just of his face, he said, “Well, let’s take some more pictures around the roof so we have the publicity pictures ready.” So we started taking some pictures and I asked him; the whole skyline of New York was behind us because we were on the roof.

I said, “Do you still have that shirt that I gave you last year, the one that says New York City?” He had it and he knew where it was. So I knew that he liked it because he had traveled around a bit that year.

When he put the shirt on, we just took a picture of him with the New York City shirt. It was just one of a number of pictures that we took that morning and I had no idea that that picture that day was going to become so well known around the world. But certainly the picture of John Lennon wearing the New York City T-shirt has become my most famous photo. Like I say, when we took it, it was just one of them; we probably took hundreds of pictures that morning.

That was just one of them. But we had no idea it was going to become so famous. I mean, there are millions of pictures of John Lennon as a Beatle.

He had his picture taken 20 times a day or more, hundreds of times a day when there were a lot of photographers. So we had no idea that that picture was going to stand out and become so well known.

Are there images you consider more meaningful than your most famous ones—but that the public has overlooked? Can you share the story behind this?

One of my other pictures of John Lennon; John Lennon is at the Statue of Liberty. I feel that is one of my most important photos. The U.S. government was trying to deport John Lennon and throw him out of the country. I felt that the Statue of Liberty was a symbol of welcome to America and that we should be welcoming great artists like John Lennon and not trying to throw them out.

So I suggested to John that we go to the statue and take a picture. He agreed right away. We went down there.

I drove him down in my car, took the ferry like a normal tourist from England. We didn’t ask permission because people go out there to take pictures all the time. But again, we had no idea it would become as well known as it has.

For me, it’s my most important photo because I think that a lot of people relate to John Lennon in terms of personal freedom the same way they relate to the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of personal freedom. Also because that’s one of the few pictures that I thought of in advance and suggested, “Let’s take a picture at this place.” Mostly, I would just go to wherever the artist is and do the best I can in that place.

But the Statue of Liberty was something I thought of in advance. I asked John and he agreed to go there. Like I said, I think it’s one of my more important photos.

You’ve spent decades organizing your life’s work. As you look through the thousands of faces you’ve photographed, many of whom are gone, who do you find yourself talking about most often when you see their print?

Certainly John Lennon comes to mind a lot because he’s the most popular person I ever photographed. But also I think a lot about Joe Strummer because I spent quite a lot of time with him. When Joe would come to New York, he would sleep on my couch in my living room.

We’d go out drinking all night and spend quite a lot of time together. But also the New York Dolls were a lot of fun. I spent quite a number of nights in the 70s traveling around the city with Johnny Thunders, David Johansen, and later with Sylvain Sylvain.

Sylvain was like my family. I miss those people a lot, but I just feel fortunate that I met them and I got to spend time with them and that they are in my life forever. So I’m very lucky about that.

You saw the transition from the physical chemistry of the darkroom to the instant satisfaction of digital. Do you think the “effort” of film, the limited shots, the waiting time for development, forced a different kind of creative discipline that is missing today? 

I think that people thought more about editing, about taking pictures with more thought because you paid for every single frame of film and because you had to then develop that film and make prints and so on. So you kind of limited yourself and thought more in terms of editing when you took the picture because you didn’t want to waste film, whereas nowadays people just snap away indiscriminately. One of my pet peeves is that people make videos and the video is all over the place and it’s trying to show you something.

All of a sudden you’re looking at the ground because somebody is running with their camera. Like, either make a video or don’t, but don’t make a video of the ground. But like I said, it’s just made it so easy for so many people that they seem to enjoy it. I think it’s great that people can enjoy photography.

For me, I never really enjoyed developing and printing. I enjoy taking pictures and showing pictures. So for the digital world, it just makes it so much easier to make an image and to show an image.

I kind of like the digital world. It’s OK.

Although analog may seem less convenient, what do you think it offers that digital doesn’t?

What analog offers that digital doesn’t; I don’t know, it’s a different medium. It’s like oil painting and acrylic painting. When acrylic came along; I’m old enough to remember in the 60s when people started making acrylic paintings and people were horrified saying, “That’s not classic. It’s not real. It’s not oil, it’s plastic.” But nowadays, almost all paintings are made from acrylic, but oil painting didn’t disappear.

I don’t think photography with film is going to disappear. It’s just going to become more of an art form. For me, I’m more interested in the image rather than the process.

Analog photography is just always so much more difficult than digital. It’s messy. You have to have chemicals and things spill; there’s all kinds of more processes involved.

Digital is just so much easier. You can really fix things so much better in Photoshop than in a darkroom. It takes a master in the darkroom.

It’s still very hard to get all the details right. Whereas with Photoshop, you can do every single pixel one at a time. You can really get in there and fix things.

So I kind of like the digital world. Like I said, it’s different  like acrylic versus oil painting.

What role do you think photographers play  in building cultural memory? How do you hope future generations, who didn’t live through that era, to understand your work?

I don’t know if they will understand, because people misunderstand a lot. They see a picture, but they don’t really know what it was like to be there, and the world has changed quite a lot since then. So I really don’t know.

I don’t try to predict the future. I don’t know what’s coming and I don’t know what other people think. I just know what I think.

I enjoy making images and I think it’s great that so many people can make images. It does seem like the world is being a little overwhelmed with the millions of images that are being uploaded every single day. You’re kind of overwhelmed with so much to see.

But that’s not up to me. They don’t ask me about that. Life is what you get.

I’m just enjoying it. I’m glad to be alive.

Photos courtesy of Bob Gruen
A special thanks to Carol Klenfner and Richelle DeLora

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.