Blondie guitarist Chris Stein (1973 Fine Arts) not only co-wrote, with singer Debbie Harry, enduring, infectious pop songs—such as the shimmering “Heart of Glass” and the New Wave–funk classic “Rapture”—he also documented the band’s vibrant downtown milieu. In iconic portraits, candid shots and video, Stein captured everyone from performers like The Ramones, Richard Hell and Jayne County, to artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, as well as, of course, the astonishingly photogenic Harry—backstage, on set and in hotel rooms around the world. His new monograph Point of View: Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene (Rizzoli) is a love letter to his city, focusing on the urban backdrop to his life through wry, poignant, mostly black-and-white street photography. A series of self-portraits around the abandoned buildings at Sheepshead Bay from 1969 to 1970 and images of the smoking Twin Towers and stunned crowds on 9/11 bookend the moody collection. (An earlier collection of Stein’s photos, Chris Stein / Negative: Me, Blondie, and the Advent of Punk was published by Rizzoli in 2014.)

I graduated from SVA a couple of decades after Stein, under the reign of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose embrace of broken-windows policing and crackdown on so-called “quality-of-life” crimes scrubbed the city of graffiti and kneecapped underground nightlife. As I look back, it makes sense that the turn-of-the-century dance-rock and electroclash music scenes in New York—which my own post–riot grrrl band, Le Tigre, floated between—would find inspiration in the aesthetics of the bygone demimonde Stein chronicled. He and I spoke a few days before Christmas 2018 (and a month before his public talk, with Harry, at the SVA Theatre, hosted by SVA Career Development) about art school, Instagram, Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood and his new book.

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Chris Stein shares his experiences as an SVA student, photographer and musician