Roberta Bayley

Biography

Roberta Bayley reigns supreme as one of the principal photographers who served as a significant visual chronicler of the punk rock music movement that lasted from the mid-70s up until the early 80s. Roberta was born in Pasadena, California, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended San Francisco State University for three years before dropping out in 1971. Bayley briefly lived in London, England, and eventually settled in New York City. Roberta worked as a door person at the legendary Big Apple punk club CBGB's and subsequently befriended a lot of key punk music celebrities. Among the punk music artists she has photographed are Iggy Pop, Blondie, Richard Hell, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, Joe Strummer, and The Ramones (she took the picture of them which appears as the cover photo on their classic debut album), Nick Lowe, The Damned, The Clash, The Dead Boys, and The New York Dolls. Moreover, Bayley was the chief photographer for "Punk" magazine. Monographs Roberta's photographs are featured in the books "Blondie: Inuits, 1976-1980" and "Blondie: Unseen, 1976-1980." Other books that feature Roberta's photographs in them are "Blank Generation Revisited: The Early Days of Punk," "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk," and "CBGB and OMFUG: Thirty Years from the Home of Underground Punk." Bayley co-wrote the book "Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography" with Victor Bockris. She has a small part as a street girl in the gritty independent feature "New York Beat Movie." Roberta is interviewed in the retrospective documentaries "Punk: Attitude," "End of the Century," and "Un-Defining Punk." Her photographs have been exhibited in such major cities as New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Austin, Paris, Portland, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, and Pittsburgh. Roberta Bayley still lives and works in New York City.