Billy Idol, New York, 1978

ROBERTA BAYLEY (B. 1950)
Billy Idol, New York
signed, titled, numbered 2/25 and dated 'Billy Idol New York 1978 CIBA Roberta Bayley 2/25' (on the reverse)
cibachrome print
16 x 20 inches
Executed in 1978
this piece is number 2 from an edition of 25.

A cibachrome print of Billy Idol photographed by Roberta Bayley in New York in 1978, the year Idol's Generation X crossed the Atlantic to play CBGB and the rest of the downtown circuit. The frame catches Idol bleached and spiky on a New York street in a pale-pink jacket — the early-Generation X aesthetic that would carry him out of the second wave of UK punk and toward the solo career that would define him in the decade ahead. Bayley shot Idol with the same insider access she brought to the wider scene as door manager at CBGB and house photographer at PUNK Magazine — proximity that gave her work a quality the era's press photographers could rarely match.

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