Reclining Deborah Harry, Las Vegas Aladdin Hotel, 1979

ROBERTA BAYLEY (B. 1950)
Reclining Deborah Harry, Las Vegas Aladdin Hotel, 1979
double signed, titled, numbered A.P. and dated 'Deborah Harry Las Vegas Aladdin Hotel 1978 Roberta Bayley. A.P. Roberta Bayley' (on the reverse)
cibachrome print
sheet: 17 x 21 1/2 inches image: 16 x 20 inches
executed in 1979.
this work is one from an edition of two.

An artist's proof, double-signed, titled and dated by Bayley on the reverse — a cibachrome print of Debbie Harry reclining on a hotel-room couch at the Aladdin in Las Vegas, 1979, in a white dress and white heels, captured during the Parallel Lines world tour that took Blondie from CBGB graduates to one of the most-watched pop acts on the planet.

The Aladdin was, in 1979, one of the city's most storied resort properties (it would be demolished and replaced two decades later), and Bayley's framing of Harry in repose inside one of its rooms reads as the kind of behind-the-tour image her scene-insider access made possible — Harry photographed not by a press handler but by someone who had been documenting her since the earliest CBGB nights.

This Cibachrome is one of only two prints in existence of this image — Bayley printed the negative a single time, producing the pair, and never returned to it. The Cibachrome process itself, with its dye-destruction archival stability and the deep saturated blacks and reds that defined the format, has been discontinued since 2012, which means no further prints of this image can be produced in the medium the photographer chose.