Bob Gruen Photographs

Great Modern Pictures
17 West 24 Street New York City
Tel.: 212-242-2581
Tuesday-Saturday 10-6

Celebrated rock photographer Bob Gruen’s most famous photographs of the Rolling Stones need no introduction to music fans. They have been extensively published over the last 25 years. The Great Modern Pictures exhibition, 40+ photographs, will include Gruen’s "icon" images along with others less often seen -- some exhibited here for the first time. The photographs date from the early 1970’s to the present.

Born in 1946, Bob Gruen began his career in the late 1960’s when he was hired by Atlantic Records to photograph a party for the Bee Gees. By the mid-1970’s Gruen was already regarded as one of the world’s premier documentary rock photographers. He toured with and photographed such legendary groups as the Who, the Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Gruen’s photographs of the New York and London punk scene in the 1970’s, including the Clash and Sex Pistols, are definitive. He is also recognized for his deep personal and professional involvement with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from which came perhaps his single most famous image: John Lennon in a NYC T-shirt.

In the more than 30 years since he began taking photographs Bob Gruen’s images have appeared in almost every conceivable form of print: postcards to posters to postage stamps. Of his many books, the most recent is Crossfire Hurricane (1998), a compendium of his Rolling Stones photographs.

Bob Gruen, who describes himself as "a major Stones fan," recalls the first time when, at age 19, he saw the group in action:

"It was in November '65 at the Academy of Music in New York ... I'm on my way to 14th Street to buy a $10. pair of Flagg Brothers boots--Beatles boots in fact--and when I get to the store I notice a whole bunch of kids standing on the street, right in front of the Academy. A friend of mine comes over so I say 'Hey, what's going on?' and she goes 'the Rolling Stones are playing here, you wanna ticket?' Well, I'd never heard of the Stones, but it looks like a cool scene, so I buy the tickets and run back to where my friends are rehearsing on Bleecker Street. They're all too busy jamming to go, but Larry Coryell, the guitar player, who's there rehearsing with them, decides to come with me to the show.

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