Joe Strummer, New York, 1980

ROBERTA BAYLEY (B. 1950)
Joe Strummer, New York, 1980
initialed, titled, numbered 6/15 and dated 'Joe Strummer New York 1980 6/15 RB' (on the reverse) 
cibachrome print
20 x 16 inches
executed in 1980
this piece is number 6 from an edition of 15.

Number 6 from an edition of 15, initialed, titled, numbered and dated by Bayley on the reverse — a cibachrome print of Joe Strummer photographed by Roberta Bayley in New York in 1980, the year of The Clash's Sandinista! sessions and the band's extended stay in the city that had become a second home. The frame catches Strummer in a black cowboy hat and a red-and-black Western shirt, sitting on a bed leafing through a magazine — the unforced proximity Bayley brought to the entire scene as door manager at CBGB and house photographer at PUNK Magazine, applied to one of punk's defining frontmen at the height of his American moment. London Calling had been recorded the year before, and Strummer himself had become a familiar figure in the downtown circuit Bayley documented from the inside.

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