Debbie Harry, James (White) Chance, Chris Stein, 1980

ROBERTA BAYLEY (B. 1950)
Debbie Harry, James (White) Chance, Chris Stein 1980
signed, titled, numbered 2/25 and dated 'Deborah Harry, James Chance, Chris Stein 1980 Roberta Bayley 2/25' (on the reverse)
cibachrome print
11 x 14 inches
executed in 1980
this piece is number 2 from an edition of 25.

Number 2 from an edition of 25, signed, titled, numbered and dated by Bayley on the reverse — a cibachrome print from 1980 capturing a moment that condensed the breadth of downtown New York's music scene into a single frame: Debbie Harry in a green blazer at the left, the no-wave saxophonist James Chance in red blazer, bow-tie and saxophone at the center, and Chris Stein with guitar at the right, the three of them standing against a wall layered with overlapping posters, photographs and tear sheets in someone's lived-in apartment. By 1980 Blondie were one of the most-watched acts on the planet — Parallel Lines had carried "Heart of Glass" to No. 1 the year before, and Autoamerican was about to do the same with "Call Me" and "The Tide Is High" — while James Chance, leading both Chance and the Contortions and his James White and the Blacks variation, sat at the center of the no-wave moment. The frame pulls together the punk-pop crossover end of the scene and its furthest avant-garde edge into a single image.

Cibachromes are prized above all other prints for its optical luminosity, absolute colour saturation, and archival permanence: where conventional chromogenic prints build colour by forming new dyes, cibachrome achieves extraordinary depth by replacing existing ones. Because cibachromes have been discontinued, every surviving example is, by definition, the last of its kind