From June 17th to July 5th, the exhibition at the MArTA in Taranto dedicated to the Ramones and fifty years of Punk.
There’s a photograph that, before you’ve even heard a note, tells you everything you need to know about punk rock: four boys leaning against a peeling wall on New York’s Lower East Side, wearing ripped jeans and leather jackets, with long hair and gazes that oscillate between casual and menacing. It’s 1976, and those boys are the Ramones: the lens they’re looking into is Roberta Bayley’s camera.
Roberta Bayley was born in Pasadena, California, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended San Francisco State University for three years, then dropped out in 1971 and moved to London. It was there that she had her first significant encounter with what would become her world: in 1973, she worked briefly for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at their Let It Rock store. In 1974, Roberta arrived in New York, a city where punk history was being written. In July of that year, she met musician and poet Richard Hell, and a few months later, she began working as a doorman at CBGB, at the request of Terry Ork, the manager of Hell’s band, Television. CBGB—an acronym for Country, Bluegrass, Blues—was actually the hub where the entire downtown New York scene was formed: Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, and, of course, the Ramones.
READ MORE
What’s striking about Bayley’s story is how quickly photography became her calling. It wasn’t until November 1975 that she bought her first professional camera, intending to document what she saw happening around her in New York’s downtown music scene. Before then, photography had remained an unfulfilled aspiration. Just three months after buying the camera, she took what would become the cover of the Ramones’ first album. The story of how that photograph became the album cover is now legendary. In 1976, Bayley began working for John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil at Punk magazine, where she photographed the Ramones for the third issue in February of that year. Punk magazine wasn’t just a publication: it was the place where the aesthetic and vocabulary of an entire subculture were defined.
The shot was never intended as a cover, but as an illustration for the magazine. After taking some photos of the band inside the loft, Bayley decides to go for a walk with them around the neighborhood. A crumbling brick wall near East Second Street and the Bowery provides the perfect backdrop for the band, whose spirit Bayley masterfully captures. Although Sire had hired a professional photographer, paid around $2,000, to shoot the album cover, the Ramones and their manager Danny Fields weren’t happy with the result and had to quickly find an alternative. Thus, they chose Bayley’s shot, which helped shape the aesthetic of punk in the second half of the 1970s, becoming an iconic image capable of encapsulating an entire cultural movement.
After that shoot, Bayley became the lead photographer for Punk magazine, traveled to England to document the British punk scene, worked with Blondie for a year, and followed the Sex Pistols on their 1978 American tour. Her archive became an extraordinary visual map of an unrepeatable decade.
Today, Bayley’s photographs, correspondence, diaries, personal papers, and professional materials are preserved in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, a testament to the historical and cultural significance of his work.
Around 1980, Bayley decided to put down the camera: he had photographed practically everything he wanted to photograph, and he felt he was in danger of losing his amateur status, as he ironically stated.
A new window will open on museotaranto.cultura.gov.it
Medimex 2026 is an International Festival & Music Conference promoted by the Apulia Region and Puglia Culture as part of the Puglia Sounds project for the development of the regional music system. The event will take place in Taranto from 17 to 21 June 2026.
